0:00

M This

0:02

is Mesters in Business with Very

0:04

Results on Bloomberg Radio.

0:09

This week on the podcast, I have an extra

0:11

special and fascinating guests.

0:14

His name is David McCraney and

0:16

he is a science journalist and author.

0:20

I first came to know David's

0:22

work through his blog and

0:25

book You Are Not So Smart, which was

0:27

a fun review of all of

0:29

the cognitive foibles and

0:31

behavioral errors we all make. But

0:34

it turns out that David was

0:37

looking at how people

0:39

change their minds, how you persuade people, and

0:42

he thought the answer was found

0:45

in all of these cognitive errors. And

0:47

if you could only alert people to

0:49

the mistakes they were making, whether

0:51

it be fact checks or just showing

0:53

them their biases uh

0:55

and the heuristics they use and the rules of

0:57

thumb they use that we're wrong, hey

1:00

would come around and see the light. And

1:02

as it turns out, that approach is

1:04

all wrong, and his mia

1:07

culpa is essentially this book

1:09

How Minds Change. It turns out that

1:11

persuading people about

1:13

their fundamental beliefs involves

1:16

a very very specific set of steps,

1:19

starting with they have to want to change.

1:22

They have to be willing to change, which

1:24

only occurs when people come

1:27

to the realization that they

1:29

believe something for perhaps reasons

1:31

that aren't very good, and

1:34

it's a process, it's an exploration.

1:36

It's fascinating the people

1:39

he's met with and discussed, whether

1:41

it's deep canvassing or street epistemology,

1:44

or some of the other methodologies that are used

1:46

to persuade people that some of

1:49

their really controversial political

1:51

beliefs are wrong. He's met with

1:53

various people from all everything from

1:55

flat Arthur's to antivactors

1:58

to the folks who have left the

2:00

Westboro Baptist Church, a

2:02

pretty notorious and controversial institution.

2:06

I found this conversation really to be

2:09

tremendous and fascinating, and

2:11

I think you will also. With no

2:13

further ado, my interview with

2:15

David McRaney. Well, I've been a fan

2:17

of your work and I thought when this book

2:20

came out it was a great opportunity to sit

2:22

down and have a conversation with you. Before

2:24

we get to the book, let's talk a little bit about your background.

2:27

You started as a reporter covering everything

2:29

from Hurricane Katrina, test

2:31

rockets for NASA, Halfway

2:33

Home for homeless people with HIV.

2:36

What led you to becoming focused

2:39

on behavior in psychology.

2:42

Well, I thought that's what I was gonna do for a living. I was. I went

2:44

to school to university to study

2:47

psychology. I thought it would be a therapist, got

2:50

that degree. But then as I was doing that, uh,

2:52

there was a sign up on campus that said

2:55

opinionated in big helvetica font and

2:57

I was like, yeah, I am that would mean that seems what is

2:59

that? And said, you know, come down to the offices

3:01

of the student newspaper. I went down there and said, how does

3:03

this work? They said, just email us stuff.

3:06

You have an opinions piece you want to do. I'm like m and

3:08

I I wrote a really like uh

3:11

sophomore thing about Starbucks on

3:13

campus because it was just about to come into campus. And I

3:15

wrote that and wrote a couple of things. And then there

3:18

was a study that had just recently come out, and who knows if

3:20

it's replicated or stood the test of time, but it

3:22

was when your favorite sports team

3:24

loses, men's sperm counts go down.

3:27

And I thought, our team

3:29

at our school had lost every

3:32

single game that year so far? What

3:34

does that mean for the future progeny

3:37

alumni? That's right? And I thought it would be a

3:39

great headline that would be funny. And the

3:41

headline I wrote was, you know, evidence

3:43

suggests the sperm counts reach record lows on campus.

3:46

And uh one of my professors

3:49

laughed about it and asked the whole class that they had read

3:51

it, but they didn't know that I was in the class. And I was like, oh, way, this could

3:53

be fun So I switched to journalism,

3:55

and you know, went all the way through the student

3:57

paper and then went into print journalism and TV journalist.

4:00

But I once I've reached a certain point in

4:02

that world, I wasn't able to write anymore. I was

4:04

doing editing and helping other people, and I just really

4:06

wanted to write something. And it just happened blogs

4:08

were becoming very popular that time. Uh

4:11

my dad says, and uh others

4:13

that were like, oh, that's way later. I'm thinking

4:16

back to uh Yahoo's

4:18

geo cities and ye world.

4:20

I mean, I'm I'm the o G when it comes to blogging,

4:23

go way way back. I just happened to be

4:25

there when they blew up on the point of like they got book

4:27

deals and I started a blog called you Were Not So

4:29

Smart about all the cognitive biases and fallacies

4:31

and heroistics that I really enjoyed, and

4:33

I wrote a piece about brand loyalty that went

4:36

viral and the rest is history.

4:38

That was asked to write a book about it, and then

4:41

I was like, oh, I will continue playing in

4:43

this world. But I started. I started the podcast

4:45

to promote the second book because the first book did

4:47

so well. They said, and do another really quickly, and I did, you

4:49

are less dumb now? You are now less dumb yet? And

4:52

I just so happened to start a podcast right when

4:54

podcasts were becoming a thing. I sent an email to Mark

4:56

Mayren because he had the number one podcast. I said, how do you do this?

4:58

And he actually sent me an email with a a point

5:01

really h like each with links

5:03

to Amazon items and no

5:05

kidding, and he was very nice. And I got

5:08

all this stuff and started it up, and that

5:10

has now becomes from the centerpiece, because that's

5:12

uh, I was there when I got going. My My

5:14

pitch for this podcast was WTF

5:17

meets Charlie Rose, and nobody

5:19

knew what w TF was. I

5:22

mean, they didn't know the acronym, nor did they

5:24

know the podcast. Because you know, you have

5:26

to be a little bit of a comedy junkie

5:28

to have found that in the early days.

5:31

Later on it was ubiquitous. So

5:33

sticking with journalism when you

5:35

were still writing, you seem to have covered

5:37

some really unusual and interesting

5:40

stories. Tell us about one of the more surprising

5:43

things that you covered. I always wanted to do

5:45

feature pieces. That was the world that I loved, and that was always

5:47

in journalism school and you know, uh,

5:49

Frank Sinatra has a cold, electricoli ascid

5:52

test. I just wanted to write features. I wanted to be

5:54

there in person and and like tell

5:56

you explore humanity from the inside out

5:58

my way and I the Halfway

6:00

Home for HIV positive men

6:03

for homeless people in the Deep South. That was a

6:05

real turning point for me because there's uh. I

6:07

had to spend about three weeks on that story, and I visited

6:09

all the different people, went to all the different meetings, and

6:12

the homelessness is very invisible in the Deep South. They

6:14

often live, uh in the woods.

6:16

You know, they're looking for us and they there's

6:19

a lot of people in the Deep South. I don't think there is a homeless problem.

6:21

And that was a really interesting way to break that story

6:23

into the public.

6:25

You know, consciousness of no, no, there's a problem

6:27

here. It's just hidden from you in a very particular way,

6:30

and a lot of people aren't even wear their organizations

6:32

that dealt with that, and that really show

6:35

me this is the world I want to be and this kind of stuff I want to

6:37

do. So I'm picking up a theme in

6:39

both your writing columns and books,

6:41

which is there's a problem you don't

6:43

know about it. It's hidden, and

6:46

here it is. That's the whole thing, Like hidden

6:48

worlds are it for me? Like I grew up in a trailer

6:50

in the woods in the Deep South, and as an only

6:52

child, I was always searching for

6:55

the others. I didn't know how I was going to get there, and

6:57

once I got at a hand was extended into this stage.

7:00

It's all I want to do. Like I call him taramissoum

7:02

moments because I remember the

7:04

first time you had tarremsa I was

7:07

I went to. It was when I was still in the working

7:09

for a TV station. We had a little conference

7:11

where people in my position went and we went there

7:14

and we got tarmiseu as a dessert and I remember

7:17

took a bite of it and I was like, oh my god, this is so

7:19

damn good. What what is this, and

7:21

everyone there was like, uh, it's

7:23

Tarmissus, And I was like, oh yeah, yeah,

7:25

termisous loved the stuff and and

7:27

but that's it. That's what I'm pursuing now. I

7:30

want more of those things. I didn't know. I didn't know. You

7:32

know, that's really quite interesting. So I

7:35

guess it's kind of natural that you evolve

7:37

towards behavior and cognitive

7:40

issues. I was going to ask you what led to it,

7:42

but it seems like that's something you've been driving

7:44

for your whole career. Yeah, it's a unity through humility.

7:46

It's it's we're all absolutely

7:50

stumbling and fumbling in the dark and pretending like

7:52

we're we know we're up to even here in these fantastic,

7:54

you know, bloomberg offices, like uh.

7:57

The thing I want to avoid is the sense that I've

7:59

got it all figured out. And there

8:01

are massive domains in psychology,

8:03

neuroscience, and other social sciences that just start

8:05

from that place and then investigate it.

8:08

And I find that when I discover these

8:10

things that we all share that should give

8:12

us a pause, should cause us to

8:14

feel humility. I feel like I'm in

8:16

the right spot, and I want to like dig deeper into

8:18

those places and reveal them so we can all be on the same

8:20

page that way. So blind spots, unknown

8:24

unknowns, things that we are just clearly

8:26

clueless about, and the biases that they're When

8:28

I started out, things like confirmation

8:31

bias, wasn't you know there wasn't as just the tip

8:33

of the tongue as it is now and survivorship bias,

8:35

things like that. So I noticed in

8:37

this book nothing written about

8:39

Dunning Krueger, nothing about Chaldoni's

8:42

persuasion. Is that

8:44

a different approach to decision making

8:47

and psychology? Like or because

8:49

I always assume there would be a little bit of an overlap

8:51

there, I didn't want to retread anything

8:54

there. There's some foundational stuff that I do

8:56

talk about in the book that feel like you can never not talk

8:59

about, some which go back a century

9:01

and like the introspection illusion has to always

9:03

be uh talked about. We don't

9:05

know the antecedence to our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, but

9:07

we are very good at creating narratives to explain ourselves

9:10

to ourselves. And if you always

9:12

have to mention that in any book about this topic, as far

9:14

as concern and so there's a little bit of that. But like

9:17

Dunning, Krueger and uh all

9:19

the other big heavy hitters, I definitely did not want

9:21

to write How to Win Friends and Influence People, Part

9:23

Two because I wanted to come from a very

9:26

different perspective on all this, and I didn't want

9:28

it to be a book specifically about persuasion,

9:30

because I don't even start talking about actual persuasion

9:32

techniques still about page two hundred, Like, I show

9:34

you people who are doing things that could be labeled as persuasion

9:36

techniques, but I don't get into the like the science of it till

9:38

later. Other you mentioned Dunning Krueger.

9:41

I I just recently spent some time with

9:43

Old Dunning, Professor David Dunning

9:45

he um a former guest on the

9:47

show. I don't think he's that old. I think, yeah,

9:50

I say old in the chow me pat

9:52

you on the back cut of right he Uh. I keep

9:54

asking to come back on the show, but he's working on a new project

9:56

and he's a new book on Dunning Crew. Yeah. Yeah, because

9:58

you know that a lot of people has been all these people who want

10:00

to knock it down and and he's there

10:03

have been attempts, but none have really landed

10:05

a blow. So we helped him out, or he helped us

10:07

out. My good friend Johansson has a YouTube

10:09

channel and uh it does explore different

10:11

science Stuff's called be Smart, and we

10:14

were talking about that recently. There was a story about

10:16

someone who, uh, the pilot you went unconscious

10:18

and they've landed the airplane but they got help from

10:20

the tower. And we were talking

10:22

about that and I was like, I feel like I

10:24

could land an airplane based off all my video game

10:27

experience, and Joe said

10:29

he thought he could too, and I said, this has got

10:31

to be done in Kruger, right, And I said

10:33

it would be cool if you did a video

10:35

where you got into like one of those commercial

10:38

commercial flight simulator and they just said,

10:41

yeah, I try, go ahead, land knock yourself. And

10:43

so he got I get I got

10:45

him in touch with Dunning, and Dunning was like, I can't

10:47

wait to be part of this project. So

10:49

he both interviews back and forth with Dunning

10:51

before and after, and of course he gets in the simulator

10:54

and they hand him the controls and they say, okay, landed, and

10:56

of course he crashed. And you crashed it three times.

10:58

That's impressive, you know. Even David

11:01

Dunning tells a wonderful story

11:03

about they never expected the

11:05

research paper Dunning Krueger

11:07

on metacognition to explode.

11:10

And he goes, I never thought about trademarking

11:12

it. He goes, go on, go on Amazon. You'll

11:15

see Dunning Krueger University shirts,

11:17

key chains, all sorts of stuff. He goes, there's

11:19

a million dollars there. I just had no

11:22

experience in that, and I got a little Dunning

11:24

crugerd did

11:26

not did not think about the

11:28

commercial side of it. So there's a quote

11:31

I want to share because it sets up

11:33

everything. Uh, and I'm I'm

11:35

sort of cheating. It's from towards the end of the

11:37

book. We do this because we are

11:39

social primates who gather information

11:41

in a bias manner for the purpose

11:43

of arguing for our individual

11:46

perspectives in a pooled

11:48

information environment within

11:50

a group that deliberates on shared

11:53

plans of actions towards

11:55

a collective goal. Kind of sums

11:57

up everything we do in a US.

12:00

That was a lot of work, with years of work

12:02

within that little little that

12:04

A lot of that comes from something that's called the interactions model.

12:07

Uh. They're sort of a peanut butter and chocolate have come up

12:09

and in this book because I've spent years

12:11

talking to people through you are not so smart, and I would

12:13

argue that we're flawed and irrational,

12:16

right, And that was there was a big pop psychology

12:18

movement for that about a decade

12:20

ago, things like predictably Irrational

12:23

and uh, even the work of Knomen

12:25

Diversky, like a lot of the like interpretation

12:28

of that was like, oh, look how dumb we are, right, and

12:30

look how easily fooled we're Look how bad we were probabilities.

12:33

And one of the incepting moments of this

12:35

book was I did a lecture and somebody came

12:38

up to me afterwards. Her father

12:40

was had slipped into a conspiracy theory, and she asked, what

12:42

do I do about that? And I told

12:44

her nothing like but

12:46

I felt gross saying it.

12:48

I felt like I was locking my keys in my car. I felt

12:50

like, I think I know enough

12:53

to tell you that, but I know I don't. And also I

12:55

don't want to be that that pessimistic and centicle.

12:57

And at the same time, the attitudes and

12:59

norms on same sex marriage the United States had

13:01

flipped like very rapidly, We're

13:04

that. So those two things together

13:06

I was like, I would I want to understand this better.

13:08

So I invited on my podcast Hugo mercy A

13:11

and he teamed up with Dan Sperber and they created

13:13

something called the interactions model, which is a model

13:15

that I only want to talk to them about, you know, changing minds,

13:17

arguing, and it opened up this whole world

13:19

and through them, I also met with Tom Stafford,

13:22

and there's the interactionist model, and

13:24

there's the truth wind scenario, and those are sort

13:26

of a peanut butter and chocolate my come up. And it's because instead

13:28

of looking at people as being flawed in irrational, alsa

13:30

is just as biased and lazy, which is different. And

13:33

what you're just talking about what that paragraph is about the

13:35

interactionist model, which is uh, A

13:38

lot of the research that went into all those

13:40

books from about a decade ago. They

13:43

were pulling from studies that were done on individuals

13:45

and isolation. And then when you pool all

13:47

of their conclusions together and you

13:49

treat people as a group of people

13:52

based off that research, we do look kind

13:54

of flawed, right, we do look very irrational.

13:57

But if you take that exact same research and you allow

13:59

people to do liberating groups, you get much

14:01

different reactions, much different responses, and

14:05

that's been furthered by the work of Tom Stafford.

14:07

He's been taking some of the old stuff from those old

14:09

studies and putting them to groups

14:11

and even creating um social media

14:14

similarcrooms that work like Twitter

14:16

and Facebook and stuff, but have a

14:18

totally different context, allows people to deliberate

14:20

and argue in different ways and you get much

14:23

different results. You get better results were much. A good

14:25

example of that is like, uh, you take something

14:27

from the common reflection task or something like

14:29

a I'll make it real simple so we

14:31

don't have to like do any weird math in their heads.

14:33

Like you're running a race and you pass the person in second

14:35

place, what place you in? And you know

14:37

the intuitive answer You're start trying to work it out in your

14:39

head. But the answer one if

14:41

you like lean back, is well I replaced second

14:43

place. I'm in second place. But if you ask

14:45

people individually you get a pretty high response

14:48

fade where they get the wrong answer. But

14:50

if you take that exact same question and you pose

14:52

it to a group of people and I do some lectures

14:54

now and you say, Okay, I'm

14:57

gonna ask this question, keep the answer to yourself. Now,

15:00

does anyone to have the right answer. You know you have the right answer.

15:02

Raise your hand. Somebody raised their hand. I say, okay,

15:04

what's the answer. They give you the answer. Then you say,

15:06

explain your reasoning, and then they explain the reasoning. When

15:09

they give their answer, there will be a grumble on the crowd. When

15:11

they explain the reasoning behind it, the crowd goes,

15:13

Okay. Now, if you took everyone's

15:16

individual answer and pulled it together,

15:18

you'd be like, wow, this group got their

15:20

wrong answer. But if you allow that deliberation

15:23

moment to take place where I explain how reasoning

15:25

to you, you get a group of people who would go from

15:27

eight percent in correct correct. And

15:29

we really set up for that. And the interactionist model is

15:31

all about this the work of Humorocity and Dan Spur really

15:33

have a great book about this, called The Enigma of Reason.

15:36

It's a it's not a light read, it's really sort

15:38

of you know, academic, but it's great because

15:41

they found, looking through the old research and

15:43

their own new research, that we

15:45

have two cognitive systems, one for producing arguments,

15:48

one for evaluating arguments, and the one

15:50

that produces arguments does it very lazily

15:52

and very in a very biased manner. You can think of it like

15:55

you ask where do you want to go eat? And you know,

15:57

I have three or four people after a movie like hanging out

15:59

in the lobby like I wanna I

16:01

want to go here, I want to go here, I want to go here, and UH

16:04

they have biased reasons for that. One person's says,

16:06

hey, let's go get sushi, and the somebody's like, we're

16:09

over here and on my ex work there, or

16:11

or I someone to say I had sushi yesterday,

16:13

or I don't like sushi. That you can't predict

16:16

what are going to be the counter argument, so you to

16:18

present your most biased and lazy argument

16:20

up front, and you let the deliberation

16:22

take place in the pooled UH evaluation

16:25

process. You all flow the cognitive labor to that we're

16:27

all familiar with doing that. Everyone has

16:29

their ideas, You trade back and forth, and we decide on the

16:31

group goal on the plan, which is what this evolved

16:34

to do. But we are also very familiar with the way that plays

16:36

out on the internet, which is not good for an AUC

16:38

is removed and you don't get the same social

16:41

cues coming right, So you get like, let's say, my good

16:43

friend Alistair Croll, who runs conferences.

16:46

He put it to me like this. He's like, on the Internet, when

16:48

you say, uh, I want a grilled cheese

16:50

sandwich, Uh, it's not an argument

16:52

for for who wants grilled cheese sandwiches? Should we

16:54

get grilled cheese sandwiches anywhere else? Agree with me? On

16:57

the Internet, on most of the platforms we use today,

17:00

it's saying I want grilled cheese sandwiches.

17:02

Who wants to go with me to the grilled cheese sandwich room?

17:04

And so everyone who agrees with that position

17:06

and is already like, yeah, that's what I want to they

17:09

get pulled off into a community of people who

17:11

want this and then a whole new set of psychological

17:13

act that was going to play, which is all about being a social

17:15

primate and being a community. So there's no

17:17

iteration, there's no debate, there's no

17:19

consensus forming as to

17:22

what the best solution to that problem

17:24

is. You just have some salient

17:27

issue and people form of what

17:30

looks like madness or what looks like some sort of

17:32

nefarious thing going down. One of

17:34

the things that the Internet gives us is the ability

17:36

to group up very quickly, and we

17:38

are social prime rates. If we go into a group,

17:40

we start being worried about motivations

17:42

like I want to be a good member of my group, I want to be to be

17:45

considered a trustworthy member of my group, and so on, and

17:48

you get a lot of weird stuff we see today that that

17:50

falls into the domain of being polarized

17:52

or being in a system where everyone is. If

17:54

you have in a group people who agree with you in your current position,

17:56

it's very difficult to argue out of it because I can always

17:58

fall back to them from back and

18:01

so that that's some of the stuff that goes into that paragraph, and it gets

18:03

more complicated from there. But yeah, it's that was

18:05

very illuminating to me, and a lot of the new material

18:07

in this book relates back to it. Not that

18:09

the earlier books were wrong

18:12

or incorrect in anyway, but I kind

18:14

of took this as a little bit of a mia Kalpa

18:17

in terms of, hey, I

18:19

was focusing on one area, but

18:21

really we need to focus on a broader

18:24

area in terms of not just

18:26

why we make these cognitive eras, but

18:29

how you can change somebody's mind who's

18:31

trapped in some heuristic

18:34

or other cognitive problem that

18:36

is leading them the wrong life. I did

18:39

not intend for this to be like some sort of marketing

18:41

phrase or trick, but it's the truth. But I in

18:43

writing a book of how Minds Change, I changed

18:45

my mind on a lot of stuff that I was like depending

18:48

on for like my career, and I'm

18:50

happy to do that. It feels really great to be on the other side

18:52

of some of these things and see it more clearly and more, you

18:54

know, more dimensionality to it. So

18:57

let's talk a little bit about the blog

18:59

that led to the books that really put you

19:01

on the map. You are not so

19:03

smart? Um. I love the title of

19:05

this Why you have too many friends

19:07

on Facebook? Why your memory

19:09

is mostly fiction? And forty

19:12

six other ways you're deluding yourself?

19:14

Was there were there forty six chapters? Was that

19:16

just a random No? That was that was exactly

19:18

how many things are exploring in the book. Yeah,

19:21

that's that's great. So we already discussed what

19:23

led you to this area of research. Why

19:26

did you decide to go from blogging,

19:28

which is easy in short form,

19:30

to writing a book, which anyone

19:32

who has done it will tell you it can be a bit

19:35

of a slog It was. Here's how that happened.

19:37

I was just blogging away back in the early

19:39

days, and maybe you had a thousand people reading

19:41

my stuff. And that was back way

19:43

before medium and Twitter and any other way to get your stuff

19:45

out there. And when

19:47

did you launch? You are not so smart. I

19:53

got into an argument two of my friends about

19:55

what was better the PlayStation three of the Xbox

19:58

three six. We got so mad at

20:00

each other that it was like I might not be able to

20:02

like hang out with them. And this isn't

20:05

a political Trump versus Biden

20:07

debate. This is yeah, but it's

20:09

just the

20:11

same psychology. And I

20:14

couldn't get over, like, why would I get mad about this?

20:16

It's just a box of wires and

20:19

uh. And I,

20:22

since I had a background in psychology,

20:24

I went and I had access to the university

20:27

library. I was I just was like, there's got to be

20:29

some material about this. And I found a bunch of material

20:31

and brand loyalty and identification and

20:33

group identity, and I wrote a little blog

20:35

about it, but I framed it as Apple versus

20:37

PC. That we mean those commercials were oute right there. And

20:41

at that time the blog Gizmoto

20:43

had stolen the iPhone prototype.

20:46

I recall that, and like Steve Jobs,

20:48

and they didn't steal it. They found it in a

20:50

bar. Found they found it in a bar,

20:53

and uh, Steve Jobs sent them emails says,

20:55

give me back my iPhone and they just they

20:58

just went for the hits and they super

21:00

viral. And I just assumed they had like a Google alert

21:02

for stuff written about Apple stuff.

21:05

And I got an email said can we reblog your

21:07

blog post on this? And I was like, yeah,

21:10

sure, And I went from a thousand to two hundred

21:12

and fifty thousand people, and I was like, oh, I should write

21:14

a bunch of stuff on And so that week I just started

21:16

going like things in that sort

21:18

of area, and I wrote a lot more things about like I learned

21:20

helplessness and other issues, and

21:23

I had an audience and it and it was maybe

21:26

four months later. An agent reached out who

21:28

had worked on pre economics and said, I think

21:30

this could be a book. And she still my age. I actually

21:32

met with her two days. If I'm in

21:34

town, I want to always try to meet with because she changed my life.

21:36

Alan Bar amazing human being. And

21:39

uh we turned it into a book, and

21:41

about half of it was already in blog form. I wrote the rest

21:43

of it for the book and that book

21:45

just really took off, like it's still even today.

21:48

It's like in nineteen different languages. It's something every

21:50

once in a while to beating number one in a different country. It was recently

21:52

number one in Vietnam. Well that's how I

21:54

went from blog to book world. But then they

21:56

were like, hey, could you write another book? And I

21:58

said, I sure can, and uh,

22:01

I wanted to promote it. And at that time,

22:03

podcasting had just become a thing. I was listening to

22:05

Radio Lab and This American Life,

22:08

and uh, I was like you, I was listening to WTF

22:11

and I said, I can. I want to do something like that,

22:13

and I just started up the podcast

22:15

to promote it. And it just turned out that the podcast

22:18

was really where I could actually explore this stuff,

22:20

and I jumped into it. So so

22:22

there is a quote. I think this might

22:24

be from the back of the book. So I don't

22:26

know if this is your words or a Blurbu'm

22:29

stealing, but quote. There's

22:31

a growing body of work coming out of

22:33

psychology and cognitive science

22:36

that says you have no clue why you act

22:38

the way you do, choose the things you choose,

22:41

or think the thoughts you think

22:44

that's got the introspecting illusion,

22:46

and it's been a real centerpiece of my work

22:48

for a long time. We don't have access

22:50

to the antecedents of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors,

22:53

but we do have thoughts, feelings of behaviors that requires

22:56

some kind of explanation, and we

22:58

are very good at coming up with these post

23:00

hoc ad hawk rationalizations

23:02

and justifications for what we're doing, and

23:05

those eventually become a narrative that we live

23:07

by. It becomes sort of the character we portray,

23:10

and we end up being an unreliable narrator in

23:12

the story of our own lives. And so the two

23:14

it's like a one two punch of you're unaware

23:16

of how unaware you are, and that leads

23:18

you to being the unreliable narrator in the story of your

23:20

life. And that's

23:22

fine, Like this is something that is adaptive

23:25

in most situations. But there's when we get into

23:27

some complex stuff like you know, politics,

23:29

running a business, designing an airplane.

23:32

You should know about some of these things because they'll

23:34

get you into some trouble that we never got into, you know,

23:36

a hundred thousand years ago. So a lot of

23:38

this is evolutionary baggage

23:40

that we carry forward. But you touched

23:43

on two of my favorite biases. One

23:45

is the narrative fallacy that we

23:47

create these stories to

23:49

explain what we're doing, as well as

23:52

hindsight bias, where after something

23:54

happens, of course we that was going to

23:57

happen, We saw it coming. Tell us

23:59

about those two dies, well, they're the fallacy.

24:01

I love this. My good friend Will Store, who writes, um,

24:04

it's a question I have for you love enemies

24:06

of science. I love Will so much. And he

24:08

has a book not too long ago he came up with the science

24:11

of storytelling, and uh, I

24:13

love that domain all the whole hero's

24:15

journey, the Camp of Campbell.

24:18

Right. The science side of that is, most

24:21

storytelling takes place exactly along

24:23

the same lines as retrospection. So your retrospection,

24:25

looking back, prospection looking forward. We

24:27

tend to look back on our own lives. As you know, we're

24:29

the hero, were the protagonist, and

24:32

whatever we're looking at specifically, it's like, Okay, we

24:34

started out in this space, and then we went

24:36

on a exploratory journey, and then we eventually

24:38

came back. Yeah, eventually we came back around

24:40

with that new knowledge and applied it. Yeah,

24:43

yeah, you know that we have the the

24:45

synthesis and the anti thesis

24:47

and all those things are how we kind of see

24:50

ourselves. Is how we make sense of our past because

24:52

we couldn't remember everything that would be horrible we

24:54

had, so we edit it to be useful

24:56

in that way. That's when when you're watching a movie or

24:58

reading a book and it doesn't seem to be work for you, it's

25:00

because it's not really playing nice with that retrospective

25:03

system. But it's also our

25:05

personal narratives seemed to be very nice and tidy

25:07

in that way, and although

25:10

they never are. If you've ever told

25:12

a story about something with someone who was also there

25:14

and they're like, it didn't happen that.

25:17

My wife says that all the time, I don't know

25:19

what what experience he had, but I

25:21

was there, None of that happened. That's right, And you, uh,

25:24

if without people to check you, what

25:26

does that say? It says that a whole lot of you, what you

25:28

believe is the story of your life is one of those

25:31

things that if we had a perfect diary of it or a

25:33

recording of it, or someone who was there who could challenge

25:35

you, it wasn't exactly the way you think it was.

25:37

Who was the professor after was it nine

25:39

eleven or some big events had

25:41

everybody right down their notes

25:44

as to what they saw, what they felt, what they were experiencing.

25:47

And then I guess these were freshmen and then by the

25:49

time they become seniors they circle back

25:51

and asked them, now it's three years later, and

25:55

not only do they misremember

25:57

it, but when showing their own notes, they

26:00

disagree with themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's been repeated a few

26:02

times. I'll talk about it and how mind changed. Robert

26:04

Burton did this experiment after the Challenger incident.

26:06

That was that was the big one, right, But the one

26:09

that in that study was when it's signaling

26:11

above the noise. And yeah, that's the most

26:13

amazing part of it. You they have

26:16

you to write down whatever happened, at what you thought happened.

26:18

They also do a prospection wise, I think they've done they've

26:20

done it where you tell me what you think is going to happen, and

26:22

you put into a Manila envelope, and then the thing happened,

26:24

you know, whatever event takes place, and then

26:26

you ask people, what did you what did you predict?

26:29

Was going to happen, and they tell you, I predicted exactly what

26:31

happened. You take it out of the minial envelope and it's

26:33

not that and they're like, oh, come on, there's no way.

26:35

But even though that's my handwriting, I

26:37

never would have written. And that's the weirdest thing in the in

26:40

the Challenger study, uh,

26:42

when he showed people that their

26:44

memory was absolutely not what they thought it was,

26:47

their first reaction was to say, you're tricking

26:50

me, like, like this is you

26:52

wrote this, like somebody else wrote this. And that

26:54

seems so similar to something called anasignosia.

26:57

And anasignosia is the denial of disorder.

27:00

And you can have like a lesion or a brain injury

27:02

that it calls some something that's wrong in your body.

27:05

But then on top of that, you have this other thing,

27:07

which is denial of the thing that's wrong your body. So

27:09

I've seen cases where people have an arm

27:11

that doesn't function properly, and they'll

27:14

ask, like, why can't you lift your arm? Why can't

27:16

you pick up this pencil? And they'll and they'll say, oh, what do you

27:18

do? And I can pick that up? But what's going on

27:20

with this arm? Like that's my mom's arm. She's playing a

27:22

joke on me right now. Like the split brain patients

27:25

where they don't understand what they're

27:27

seeing when they come up with This is the greatest

27:29

example we've been discussing is if you if

27:31

you have someone who has a they

27:34

called split brain patient, the corpus colos

27:36

and that connects the two hemispheres. They corpus

27:38

colosomy is often performed when a

27:40

person has a certain kind of they have

27:43

seizures that they don't want a cascade. Um,

27:46

you end up with basically two brains,

27:48

and you can use a divider so

27:50

that one I is going to one hemisphere

27:52

wives going the other. You can show a person in image.

27:54

Let's say you show them a terrible carrec

27:57

mangled bodies, and they feel very sick. But

27:59

the portion of and you're showing that too, is not the portion

28:01

that delivers language. So then you ask the person

28:03

who is feeling sick, why you feel sick right

28:05

now? What's going on? They say, Oh, I had something bad at lunch.

28:07

You have we we will very quickly come up with a narrative

28:10

and our explanation for what we're experiencing, and

28:12

we do so believing that narrative, even

28:14

if that narrative is way far away from what's actually

28:16

taking place. So let's quickly run through

28:18

some of our favorite cognitive bias

28:21

is going to be tested. I hope I remember this. Let's

28:23

go, um. Well, we'll start with an

28:25

easy one. Confirmation bias. Confirmation

28:27

bias. When people write about confirmation bias,

28:29

they usually get it pretty wrong. Uh, here's

28:31

the way it confirms.

28:34

It's a great way to put it. The

28:36

least sexy term in psychology

28:39

is that makes sense stopping rule. You think they

28:41

come up with a better phrase, and that that just

28:43

means when I go looking for an explanation

28:45

of something, when when it finally, when it makes sense, I'll stop

28:48

looking for information. Confirmation

28:50

bias is what happens. Here's the way I prefer

28:52

to frame it. Let's say you're at a tent in the woods. You hear a weird

28:54

sound and you

28:57

think, oh, that might be a bear. I should go look. So

28:59

what you have a negative effect in your body, you have an anxiety.

29:02

You go out looking for confirmation that that anxiety

29:04

is just or reasonable because

29:06

as a social aspect to it at all times, because

29:08

we can't escape our social selves, and

29:11

so you're looking and maybe you don't find it, you know, maybe

29:13

you don't find evidence that points in that direction. Eventually

29:15

you you modify your behavior based off what

29:17

you see with your flash lie. If you

29:20

do that online though an environment that's an

29:22

information rich environment. You have some sort of

29:24

anxiety and you're looking for justification that

29:26

that anxiety is uh is

29:29

reasonable. You'll find it.

29:31

You'll find something right, and that will confirm

29:33

that you that your search was was good

29:35

and justified and reasonable to other human beings. So

29:38

confirmation bo is very simply is just something

29:40

happens that doesn't make sense. You want to disambiguate

29:43

it. It's uncertain. You want to reach some level of certainty.

29:45

So you look for information that based off

29:47

your hunch, your hypothesis,

29:49

and then when you find information that seems to it's

29:52

like confirm your hunch. You stop looking as if

29:55

you like, did some something wrong, as

29:57

if you solved it. Why don't we as a species,

29:59

look, we're disconfirming information

30:01

just to validate in most situations is not

30:03

adaptive, like confirmation bias is actually the right

30:06

move in most situations, Like if you're looking for your keys,

30:08

you know, yeah, you don't go

30:10

looking for your keys on Mars. You go looking for

30:12

them in your kitchen, right, and like it's

30:14

the faster solution, and most of our most

30:17

of these biases go back to the adaptive

30:19

thing is the thing that costs the least calories and

30:21

and gets you to this solution as quickly as possible,

30:23

so you can go back to trying to find food not getting eaten.

30:26

And in this case, most of the time, most

30:28

of the time confirmation bias serves as well. It's in those

30:31

instances where it really doesn't serve as well that we

30:33

end up with things like you know, climate change or

30:35

what have you. What about ego depletion,

30:38

Oh, man, ego depletion is one of the things that boy that it

30:40

goes back and forth. Uh. The

30:43

original scientists are still like hardcore into

30:45

it. I love it. Uh. Whether or not ego

30:47

depletion is properly like

30:49

defined or categorized, the

30:51

phenomenon does exist. The actual mechanisms

30:54

of it aren't well understood. But when

30:56

you have been faced with a lot of cognitive

30:58

tasks, uh, you

31:01

start to have a hard time completing more

31:03

cognitive task and in general, hum

31:06

as well as issues that require willpower

31:08

and discipline. Right, So the more you the more

31:10

you use willpower, the less willpower you have to

31:12

use. It's finite, not not

31:15

unended. And this is not well understood

31:17

a lot of the like, here's why this is happening,

31:19

Like haven't I failed to replicate? So we have this phenomenon,

31:22

but we still don't quite understand what is the mechanism under

31:24

allowing it. Well, let me do one last one.

31:26

The Benjamin Franklin And that's my favorite

31:29

Benjamin Franklin effect goes back to you know, a lot of my new

31:31

book is is as in this domain of justification

31:33

and rationalization. Um, Benjamin

31:35

Franklin had someone who was opposing him

31:38

at every turn. I call him a hater in the in the

31:40

previous book, back when that was a term. Yeah,

31:43

and uh, he just had this political opponent that

31:45

he, uh, he knew was going to cause him real

31:47

problems for the next thing he was going up for. And

31:50

uh, he also knew that this guy had

31:52

a really nice book collection. And everybody also

31:54

knew that Benjamin Franklin had a nice book collection,

31:57

and so he sent them a letter and said,

31:59

there's a book that I've always wanted to read. But I can never find

32:01

I hear you've got a copy of it. No, the who

32:03

knows it seems from reading the literature that been

32:06

Refrancla totally had this book. And

32:08

uh, but the guy gave him the book as a favor, and he

32:10

was like very honored that been re Franklin asked for it.

32:12

I like to think of Benjamin Franklin just like put it on a shelf

32:15

and then wait, wait, waited a month, and then took

32:17

it back to him. Um, but he said,

32:19

thank you, I'm forever in your debt. You're

32:21

the best. And from that point forward, that guy never

32:23

said another negative thing about Benjamin Franklin. So what

32:26

that comes down to is I just observed my own behavior.

32:28

I did something that produced cognitive dissonance. I

32:30

have a negative attitude toward ben or Franklin, but I

32:32

did something that a person with a positive attitude would do. So

32:35

I must either think a strange thing

32:37

about who I am and what I'm doing, or I could just take

32:40

the easy rout out and go I like Benjamin Franklin. And

32:42

that's that I think called that the Benjamin Franklin effect.

32:45

I find that really just fascinating

32:47

that there are two phrases that I'm in

32:49

a note of in one of the books

32:52

that I have to ask about extinction

32:54

burst, and I have to ask

32:56

what is wrong with Catharsis. Catharsis

32:59

the stincionburst is a real thing that I love.

33:02

Uh. I see that everywhere I see. I see that all

33:04

in society right now in many different ways.

33:06

That extinction bursts is u when

33:08

you have a behavior that has been enforced

33:10

many many times, and you it's

33:13

your body even expects that you're going to perform this behavior,

33:16

and you start doing something like say dieting,

33:18

or you're trying to keep smoking, or you're trying to do

33:20

you're trying to just extinguish the behavior. Right

33:23

at the moment before it fully extinguishes, you

33:25

will have a little hissy fit. You'll have

33:28

a as they say back home, um,

33:30

you'll have a toddler outburst sort of

33:32

thing where you're all of your systems,

33:35

cognitive systems are saying, why don't we really

33:37

really try to do that thing again, because we're

33:39

about to lose it? And the

33:43

they call this an extinction bursts. That moment of

33:45

like if you're watching it on a slope, it's sloping

33:47

down down, down, down, and there's a huge spike. And

33:49

that could either be the moment you go back to smoking or

33:52

relapse, or the fish.

33:54

It could be the death rottle. Depends on how you how you

33:57

deal with your extinction burst. I thought that was fascinating,

33:59

And then of Tharsis comes up. Why

34:02

is the concept of that cathartic

34:06

surrender or finish the things problematic?

34:09

It's related to the extverse. There's

34:11

a for a while there this, especially

34:13

in like nineteen fifties psychology, the idea

34:15

that like just get it out, you know, like like if you're

34:17

angry, go beat up a punching bag or yell

34:21

at people from the safety of your car. Yeah. There

34:23

used to be a thing in like the eighties scream therapy. Yeah,

34:25

I recall the

34:28

unfortunately primal scream. Yeah.

34:30

Unfortunately or fortunately. Uh, the

34:33

evidence, the evidence suggests that what

34:36

this does is reward you for the behavior, and

34:38

uh, you maintain that level of anger and

34:40

anxiety and frustrations. It's self rewarding,

34:43

yea. And so it's uh, there

34:46

are ways to have cathartic experiences,

34:48

but the ones where you reward yourself for being angry

34:50

tend to keep you angry that that makes a lot of

34:52

sense. And last question on you

34:54

are not so smart? Do we ever

34:57

really know things or do we just have

34:59

a feeling of knowing? Is

35:02

an unanswerable question, thankfully, Uh

35:05

from from you? No, No, I feel like I

35:07

feel like I know. That's uh. Here's

35:09

what's important to know about the Certainty

35:11

is an emotion. This is something that gets me in trouble.

35:13

I think in like rationalists and uh, you

35:16

know, circles. But I won't get you in trouble

35:18

here. Well, thank you, because like the the ideas

35:20

like facts not feelings or your you

35:22

know, let's not get emotional, let's not make

35:24

emotional appeals. Uh,

35:27

there's no dividing emotion from cognition.

35:29

Emotion is cognition, and certainty

35:31

is one of those things that lets you bridge the two because

35:34

certainty is the emergent property of networks

35:36

waiting something in one direction or another, and

35:38

you feel like, you know, if you want to do percentage wise,

35:40

it's is you can feel it. I ask you percentage wise,

35:42

like if I ask you did you

35:44

have eggs last week on Tuesday?

35:47

And you're like, I think I did, and like, well, like on

35:49

a scale from one to ten, like on a percentage

35:51

wise on Saturday morning, I went to the dinner,

35:54

I had eggs. So that feeling that you're

35:56

getting, there's something generating that

36:00

deepeealing, right, So the

36:02

feeling of knowing is something that's separate from

36:04

knowing, but as far as subjectively,

36:07

it's the exact same thing. We only get to see this objectively

36:09

in some way, especially in those like open up the middle envelope,

36:11

let's see what you actually said. So

36:14

this is a pet peeve of mind because here

36:16

in finance there is this, for

36:18

lack of a better phrase, meme that

36:21

the markets hate uncertainty,

36:24

and whenever people are talking about what's going to happen

36:26

in the future, well, it's very uncertain,

36:28

to which I say,

36:30

well, the future is always inherently uncertain.

36:33

When things are going along fine and the market's

36:35

going up, we feel okay

36:37

with our uncertainty, so we can lie

36:40

to ourselves about it very very easily, exactly.

36:42

But when everything is terrible, the markets are

36:44

down, the Feds raising rates, inflation,

36:46

Oh, the market hates uncertainty. Now

36:49

at the uncertainty level, you didn't know

36:51

the future before, you don't know the future now, but

36:53

you can no longer lie to yourself and you

36:56

have a sense of of what's going on. This

36:58

is, by the way, a very out liar view,

37:00

because everybody loves the uncertain. So well,

37:02

I'm happy to sit here, I despise. I'm happy to sit

37:05

here and surrounded about all these people and take

37:07

the position of, uh, you're very wrong. Uh,

37:10

the they are less smart.

37:12

There is no such thing as certainty. This

37:14

is, you know, from the scientific or psychological

37:17

even philosophical domain. Everything is probabilistic

37:19

and we can like hedge our bets, but the

37:22

concept of certainty is way outside the domain of

37:24

any of these topics. Yeah, and and well, we'll

37:26

talk about bertrand Russell later. But it's

37:29

a quote from your book that always

37:31

makes me think, well, let's let's talk about

37:33

it now, because it's such an interesting observation

37:36

quote. The observer when he

37:38

seems to himself be observing

37:41

a stone is really, if physics

37:43

is to be believed, observing the

37:45

effects of the stone upon himself. Right,

37:48

Isn't that awesome? That is right from

37:51

this book How Minds Change by

37:53

Day Man Here, it's a good book. The U I

37:55

got that from interviewing the Lately

37:58

Ross who created the term naive

38:00

realism. It's another phrase I love,

38:02

and this this is a way to kind of get

38:04

into naive realism. N I realism is the assumption

38:06

that you're getting a sort of a video camera

38:08

view of the world through your eyeballs, and that

38:11

you're storing your memories and some sort of database

38:13

like a hard drive and uh,

38:16

and that when I ask your opinion on

38:18

say, uh, immigration or gun control,

38:20

that whatever you tell me came from you

38:22

went down to the bowels of your castle to your scrolls

38:25

and pulled out the scrolls by candle light and

38:27

read them all. And then one day came up from that and emerged

38:30

from the staircase and raised your finger and said, ha, this

38:32

is what I think about gun control.

38:35

And it minded what what's

38:37

invisible in the process or what becomes

38:39

invisible when we're at we're tasked with explaining ourselves.

38:41

Is that uh, all the rationalization

38:44

and justification and all the interpretation

38:46

that you've done, and all the elaboration, these all these psychological

38:49

terms, and that you Uh.

38:51

This concept of nairealism is that you

38:54

see reality for what it is and other people

38:56

are mistaken when you get into moments of conflict

38:59

and the The thing that

39:01

bergand Russell said is so nice because he is

39:03

alluding to the fact that all reality's virtual

39:06

reality, that the subjective experiences is

39:08

very limited, with the German psychologists

39:11

called an un velt the thing related

39:14

to naive realism that was so

39:16

surprising in the book. And we keep alluding

39:18

to evolution in various things. I

39:21

did not realize that the

39:23

optic nerve does not perceive

39:25

the world in three D. It's

39:27

only two dimensional. And

39:30

okay, so we have two eyes, so we

39:32

were able to create an illusion

39:34

of depth of a third dimension,

39:36

but the human eye does not see the

39:38

world in full three Yeah. I just while

39:41

while I'm in visiting New York, I spent time with

39:43

Pascal who's in the book, and he's the one

39:45

who like ram me through all this. That's

39:48

amazing, isn't it. It's uh, the retina.

39:50

I mean, you know, obviously at microscopic levels

39:52

it's three dimensional, but for the purpose of the vision,

39:54

it's a two dimensional sheet. And

39:56

so we create within

39:59

consciousness the third dimension. But it's an illusion,

40:01

just like every color is an elite. It's a very realistic

40:04

illusion, but it's an illusion, right, And

40:06

and that's why paintings can look nice because

40:08

you play with the rules of illusions that

40:10

to create depth. And even

40:14

people who who gained vision late in

40:16

life, the

40:18

understanding depth and three dimensionality is something

40:20

that takes a lot of experience. You have to learn how to

40:22

do it. And they oftentimes they'll in experiments

40:25

with people who just gained vision late in life, they'll

40:27

like put a telephone and run like

40:29

far away from them, and they'll they'll try to reach out

40:32

to it. It's like thirty ft away because you have

40:34

to learn depth. That's something that we learned over time.

40:36

We you know, we did as children. Who don't you remember,

40:38

you don't really think about it. So let's talk

40:40

about how minds change. And I want to start

40:43

by asking how did a flat

40:45

earther inspire this

40:47

book? They actually came in a little later

40:50

in the process. I was there

40:52

was a documentary on Netflix.

40:55

You may have seen it, Behind the Curve, uh,

40:58

and the producers of that were ends

41:00

of my podcast, and then they grabbed a couple

41:02

of my guests for the show and everything, and I thought it would

41:04

be you know, I would love to help promote something. I didn't know

41:06

this, but someone told me I was in the credits and

41:08

I looked in the credits it was like, you know David, thanks

41:11

to David McRaney, And I was like, oh wow. So I

41:13

emailed them and said, hey, you want to come

41:15

on my podcast, we'll talk about your documentary.

41:17

Because if I had gotten a chance to make a Netflix show, it had have been

41:19

very similar because that's it seems like

41:21

it's about flat Earth, but it's actually about motivated

41:24

reasoning and identity

41:26

and community and things like that, and community community

41:28

is a huge part of it. Group identity,

41:30

and um that

41:32

after that episode, Uh, they

41:35

a group in Sweden do they put on something like south By

41:37

Southwest called the gather Festival. They asked, Hey,

41:40

we got this crazy idea. What if you

41:42

go to Sweden and we'll get h Mark

41:44

Sargent, who was sort of the spokesperson for the

41:46

flat Earth community, and we'll put

41:48

you on stage. And I know you're writing a book about how minds

41:50

change, you can try to try out some of those techniques

41:53

on them. And I was like, oh, that sounds awesome, So um

41:56

I did. I went and I met Mark,

41:58

and uh, I found it very nice, very

42:00

lovely man. And I did try something

42:02

at the point where where I met him. I was about halfway

42:04

through and that wasn't great at the techniques, but I did an

42:06

okay job. That's that's towards the

42:08

end of the book where you actually describe um.

42:11

He said it was one of the best conversations he

42:13

ever had. You don't call him an idiot,

42:15

you know challenges views. You're really

42:18

asking how did you come to

42:20

these sorts of perspectives

42:23

to get him to focus on his

42:25

own process. That's the whole idea of the techniques

42:27

I learned about in the book. Uh, we're writing

42:29

this book. I met many different organizations. Deeve Campels are

42:31

street epistemology, people who work in motivational

42:34

interviewing and therapeutic practices, UH,

42:36

professional negotiation and conflict resolution.

42:39

UH people work in those spaces. And

42:41

what really astounded me was when I would bring the

42:43

stuff that I was witnessing to scientists

42:47

or experts. They there was this underlying

42:49

literature that made sense. But none of these

42:51

groups had ever heard of this literature for

42:53

the most part, and they definitely hadn't heard of each other.

42:55

But they did a lot of a b testing thousands of conversations

42:58

throw away. I didn't work keeping what did and they would

43:00

arrive at this is how you ought to do this, and

43:02

then would also be similar they had it

43:05

was in steps, the steps would be in the same order.

43:08

And I sorted think of it like, you know, if you wanted to

43:10

build an airplane, the first airplane ever built, no

43:12

matter where it was builder who did it, it's gonna look

43:14

kind of like an airplane. It's gonna have wings, and

43:16

it's going to be lighter than because you're dealing

43:18

with the physics that you have to

43:20

contend with when it comes to the kind of conversation

43:23

dynamics that actually persuade people or

43:25

move people or illuminate them. They

43:27

have to work with the way brains makes sins of the world and

43:29

all of the evolutionary path that pressures

43:32

all of that. And so these independent groups discovered

43:34

all that independent of each other and

43:36

of the science that supports them. And Mark Sargeant,

43:38

like when I first met him, I shook his hand and said, look, I'm

43:41

not going to like make fun of you or anything. Goes Oh, that's fine,

43:43

make fun of me all you want. And he he took out his phone and showed

43:45

me the commercially've done for LifeLock, whereas

43:47

like, if I can do it, anybody can do it, and he's

43:50

totally okay with it. But that's not

43:52

what I did. And then when I sat down with him, one of the essences,

43:54

I know we'll get to it, but it's like, you don't want to face

43:56

off and I need to win, you need to lose. I'm

43:59

trying. I'm not even to aiding you. What I want to do is

44:01

get shoulder to shoulder with you and say, isn't

44:03

interesting that we disagree? I wonder why you

44:05

want to pardner up with me and trying to investigate that mystery

44:07

together. And in so doing I opened up a space

44:10

to let him meta cognate and run through how

44:12

did I arrive at this? And that's what I did

44:14

with him on stage, and you know, we learned all sorts of things,

44:16

like he he used to be a ringer for a video

44:18

game company, so that so that's where his conspiratorial

44:21

stuff first came from. Oh so of course he

44:23

wasn't just a guy showing these contests

44:25

weren't fair. They and

44:27

it's always a name, they had

44:30

somebody skewing the outcome. Going

44:32

through his whole history, it was really clear how he got

44:34

motivated into this. But the thing that really kicked

44:36

in was, you know, flat Earth is a

44:39

pretty big group of people. They have conventions, they have dating

44:41

apps, and once he became

44:43

a spokesperson for it, and he's traveling around the world,

44:45

is going to Sweden, Like now he's not traveling

44:47

around the world, he's traveling up

44:49

across surface. That's right.

44:52

He is traversing the geography

44:55

Cartesian plane of planet, that's

44:57

right. And so that that was a really the

44:59

sun flat also, that's always my question.

45:02

If the Earth is flat, is the Sun of sphere,

45:04

why would some celestial bodies be

45:07

There are schisms within the flat earth community.

45:09

There are many different models of flat Earth. The

45:11

one that Mark Sergeant is part

45:14

of. They see the Earth that's sort of it's almost

45:16

like a snow globe. It's flat, but there's

45:18

a dome, there's a there's makes perfect

45:20

sense to and perfectly the Sun

45:22

and the Moon are are are celestial objects

45:25

that are orbs. And when you ask my good question

45:27

was like, okay, well then it seems manufactured.

45:29

Who made it? God's or aliens? And he goes and I remember

45:31

leaning in and saying it doesn't matter. Isn't

45:35

it the same thing? Well, you know,

45:37

the Greeks figured out five

45:39

thousand years ago that the Earth was round

45:41

by just looking at the shadow of the sun

45:44

cast at the same time in different

45:46

cities of different latitudes. But

45:49

five thousand years of progress, just hold

45:51

a side. Look, you wouldn't you

45:53

would believe that the number of ways that that has

45:56

been explained away in you know, flat

45:58

earth world, there's a plenty of explanations

46:00

for why that's, you know, part of the

46:02

big conspiracy. My favorite part of

46:04

the flat earth community was flat

46:07

Earth Meets done in Krueger with the guy who

46:09

built a rocket to go up

46:12

in order to prove that the Earth was flat.

46:14

We don't know what he saw because

46:17

he crashed and died. Do you recall

46:19

this was like remember three summers ago, I can tell

46:22

I can I know exactly how the response would like see

46:24

see he took him out and

46:26

they took him out. So you mentioned

46:29

several different groups, The Street

46:31

Epistemology and the

46:34

deep canvassers were really fascinating

46:36

my book. Right, So a

46:38

quick background, A well funded

46:41

group in California. We're trying

46:43

to convince people to support

46:46

the Marriage Equality Act, which

46:48

ultimately ends up failing in California

46:50

by three or four percent, and they had done

46:53

thousands of home visits, knocked

46:55

on the door, Hey, we want to talk to you about about

46:57

this act and why we think you should support it. And

47:00

the failure of that was a real

47:02

moment of clarity, and they said, we have to

47:05

rejigger everything we doing because this is totally

47:07

ineffective. And the methodology

47:09

they came up with that standing shoulders shoulder

47:11

and let's figure out why we think. Let's

47:14

explore why we think so differently. You

47:17

know, in politics and single issues,

47:19

if you can move somebody a tenth

47:21

of a percent, it's huge. Their

47:24

impact is a hundred times that it's

47:26

ten. It's

47:29

astonishing. Tell us a little bit about

47:31

what this group does that's so

47:33

effective when they're supporting a specific

47:35

issue. Yeah, the background you gave exactly

47:38

what happened. They wanted to understand how they

47:40

lost, and they went door to door asking

47:42

They came up with this idea. This Dave Fleischer, who runs

47:44

the Leadership Lab U c

47:47

l A or USC and the LGBT

47:49

Center of Los Angeles, and they're extremely

47:51

well funded, millions of millions of dollars and the

47:53

biggest LGBT organization of its

47:55

kind in the world, and the Leadership Lab was their

47:57

political action wing. And as they were doing this cavasing

47:59

thing and they lost in Prop eight, he wanted

48:02

to know, how could that be because this seems

48:04

to be an area where we would definitely wouldn't lose this, And

48:06

so he said, what if we just wouldn't ask people? And

48:08

so they did the exact same thing again. So this time they knock

48:10

on doors and say they went to areas they knew

48:12

that they law that they had lost in help us

48:15

understand, and if that somebody had voted against it,

48:17

they asked, why did you vote against it? And

48:20

they had these listening brigades about fifty seventy

48:22

five people would go out and knocked or the door, and

48:25

to their astonishment, people wanted to talk.

48:27

When they started asking, like, this is a non adversarial

48:30

thing, it's just hear them out. And

48:32

when they did that, these conversations we

48:35

go to forty minutes and they started

48:37

thinking, well, we need to record these, and they

48:39

started recording them, and somewhere along the way,

48:41

about three or four times people talk

48:43

themselves out of their position when you just stood there

48:45

and listened, don't You're not You're not nudging

48:48

them, and you're not challenging them, You're just letting

48:50

them be heard. And so they wanted to know what

48:53

did we do there, what happened in that conversation

48:55

that led to that? So they started reviewing

48:57

that those specific conversations and taking

49:00

bits and pieces and testing out was that this wasn't

49:02

that, was that, this wasn't that. And they eventually

49:04

when I met them, they had done seventeen thousand

49:06

of these conversations and recorded on the video

49:09

and they had a b tested their way to a technique

49:12

that was so powerful that while I went

49:14

there several times and went door to door with them

49:16

everything, but every time I went there would be scientists

49:18

there, there'd be activists from around the world there

49:20

because they were like, what have you done? What have

49:22

you discovered? And it's very

49:24

powerful. And over the course of writing the book, the research

49:27

was done a couple different times on them, and they found the

49:29

numbers. You're talking about twelve ten or twelve percent

49:31

success, right, And the method

49:33

is very similar. You only really know two of

49:35

the steps, but you know it's about ten steps. If you wanted

49:38

to do it the full thing The most important

49:40

aspect of this is non judgmental listening and

49:42

non judgmental listening and holding.

49:44

You're gonna hold space to let the other person explore

49:47

how they arrived at their current position. In

49:49

other words, you're going to help them

49:51

be very self reflective

49:54

and figure out their thought problems.

49:56

It's probably good to give you a foundation of what motivational,

49:59

what motivated reasoning is right here. So you

50:01

know, when somebody's falling in love with someone and you ask them

50:03

like why do you like them? Like why you why are you going

50:05

to date this person? And they'll say something like the way

50:07

they talked, the way they walked, where they cut their food, the uh,

50:10

the music they're introducing me to. When that same

50:12

person is breaking up with that same person, you ask why

50:14

you're breaking up with them, they'll say things like, well,

50:17

the way they talk, the way they walked, where they cut their food, the

50:19

dumb music they made me listen to. It. So reasons for what

50:21

will come, reasons against when the motivation to search

50:24

for reasons that will I rationalize

50:26

and justify your position change.

50:28

As you've said all throughout our conversation, we're often are

50:30

very unaware of that and if someone comes along and

50:32

gives you an opportunity to self reflecting a way where

50:34

you will go through your reasoning process, you will often

50:37

start to feel moments of dissonance

50:40

and question yourself. And as long

50:42

as the other party isn't is allowing you

50:44

to save face. And it's just non judgment and listening.

50:46

That's a big component of this and their technique.

50:48

They'll open up and say, okay, we're talking about that that

50:50

same sex marriage or transgender bathroom laws or

50:53

something. They're very political organizations, so the sort of the topics

50:55

they cover, they'll ask a person this

50:57

is this is the biggest part of everything, and this I

50:59

urge every you wanted to try this out on yourself and other people.

51:01

You can just do it on a movie like the last movie that you watch.

51:04

Let's what's last movie you watched? The

51:06

Adam Project? Okay, the Adam Project.

51:09

Did you like it? Yeah? Ryan Reynolds

51:13

boom. It's so easy to say I liked it.

51:15

Okay. Now I ask on a scale

51:18

from zero to ten, like if you're a movie review or what would

51:20

you give it? Six? Seven? Okay?

51:22

Why why does six feel like the right number? Um,

51:25

it's not a great movie. It's not The Godfather,

51:27

but it was entertaining and silly and fun.

51:29

You like The Godfather, you know that's a

51:31

ten. Yeah, you know what what do you think is the Godfather

51:34

has that this movie doesn't. It's much

51:36

more sophisticated. It tells a much

51:38

more interesting tell. It's the

51:41

characters are much more fleshed out. They're

51:43

more interesting. Um, the

51:45

violence is is gripping, whereas

51:48

the violence and this is sort of cartoony. So

51:50

we're gonna step out of that conversation when we come back to it.

51:52

But now what this is what I'm doing.

51:54

I'm listening to you. I'm not judging you, and

51:56

I'm giving you a chance to actually explore the

51:59

reasoning and at and and your values are

52:01

starting to come up and things that are unique to you and things

52:03

you like about the world are a lot of times

52:05

this is the first time a person has ever even experienced that.

52:08

And this is a moment for you to start to understand yourself

52:10

in a certain way. And a conversation about a political

52:12

issue you might start pulling in things about where

52:14

this actually, you know, the first time you ever heard

52:16

about this thing, and then will become you see it superceived

52:18

wisdom or you're being influenced by others, and

52:21

then all that comes into it's very easy

52:23

for you to extract that emotion and tell me what

52:25

you felt. I liked it, I didn't like it. When I ask

52:27

you to rationalize and justify it for me and come up

52:29

and go through your own personal reasoning process,

52:31

not my reasoning process. This is a

52:33

unique experience for a lot of people. And then the other thing I can

52:35

do is say you give it a six? How

52:38

come not say a four? You

52:41

know, under five I would think is something

52:43

I didn't especially like. You know,

52:45

I smiled and laughed throughout it, and it get

52:47

me up detained for ninety minutes. That's

52:49

and my nephews, that's all I'm looking at, you see.

52:52

And so we're getting deeper, more and deeper deeper

52:54

into the things that you you look for entertainment,

52:56

but we're talking about a political issue. This

52:58

something comes out of motivation interviewing, and they weren't even

53:00

aware of this. The deep camps, people therapists

53:03

who had dealt with people

53:05

would come in for say alcoholism or drug addiction,

53:08

and you know, they already are at a state

53:10

of ambivalence. They want to do it, and they

53:12

all and they don't want to do it. That's why they've come for help.

53:14

But a psychologist would often engage in

53:16

something called the writing reflect They say, okay, well there's

53:18

here's what you're doing wrong. Is what you need to do. Here's what you and

53:22

you you will feel something called reactants, which

53:24

is that unhand me, you fools, feeling that

53:26

I'm telling you what to think, I'm shaming

53:28

you. And when you push away from it, you

53:30

will start creating arguments to keep pursuing

53:33

the thing. And they

53:35

this was such a debacle that they developed

53:38

something come motivational interviewing, where I would start,

53:40

I would start trying to evoke from you counter

53:42

arguments. And I can do that very simply with the scale, because

53:44

when I ask you why not a four, the

53:47

only thing you can really produce for me your

53:49

reasons why you wouldn't go away from the six,

53:51

which is also kind of going towards a seven.

53:54

And in a political discussion, that's how they'll

53:56

open it up. They'll say, we're talking about transitor

53:58

bathroom law. Here's the position that I'm talking about

54:01

is coming up for a vote. I'm wondering where you're at on that like

54:03

a scale one was eer to ten. They'll tell them, and

54:05

then they'll say why that, And this is a moment.

54:08

We may stay there for twenty minutes, we go through

54:10

how you arrived at this number. And then

54:13

in that the deep campras to do something different from

54:15

the other groups. They asked the personal

54:17

if they've had a personal experience with this issue.

54:20

And on the LGBT same

54:22

sex marriage issue, what seemed

54:24

to have come up time and again was hey,

54:27

is there anybody gain your family? Do you want

54:29

them to have find love? Do you want them to find happiness?

54:32

And suddenly when it becomes personal, the

54:34

political issue gets inverted. That's right. You start

54:37

really realizing how much of this is abstraction, how

54:39

much of this has received wisdom, how much of this is political

54:41

signaling our group I inter singly, and

54:44

not every time, but many times people who will have

54:46

a personal experience related to the issue, and that

54:48

personal experience really issue will create massive

54:50

amounts of cognitive dissonance on the position I just gave

54:52

you. There's a phrase which I

54:55

was going to mention later, but I have to share

54:57

it. Excruciating disequal

55:00

a brim is that how

55:02

you ultimately get to a point where either

55:05

somebody changes their perspective or or

55:07

something breaks. This is how we change our minds on

55:09

everything, Like we're always changing your minds at all times,

55:11

like the everything is provisional until

55:13

yeah, and we don't we're not always We're totally not aware

55:16

of it most of the time. But this comes to the work of a lot of

55:18

psychologists. But I focus in on p J

55:20

because there's two mechanisms, assimilation and accommodation.

55:23

Assimilation is uh when something's ambiguous

55:26

or uncertain you when you interpret in a way that says

55:28

basically, everything I thought and felt and believed

55:30

before now I still think, feeling, believe it. This

55:32

is just a modified a little bit with

55:35

you assimilated into your current model reality.

55:37

Accommodation, on the other hand, is when there's so many anomalies

55:40

build up or this is so counterattitudinal

55:42

or counterfactual what you currently have

55:44

in your model reality are they they had called it a

55:46

schema, you must accommodate us. You can think

55:48

of it like a child sees a dog for the first

55:50

time and they're like, what is that? You

55:53

say, it's a dog in their minds?

55:55

Something categorical, something like it's got four

55:57

legs, walks on four legs, it's not wearing

55:59

any clothes, as it's furry as a

56:01

tail, it's non human dog.

56:04

And then if they see like a a orange

56:06

dog or a you know, a speckled

56:08

dog, they can just say they can assimilate that

56:11

and different versions of the thing. I already understand.

56:13

When they see a horse, they might point

56:15

at it and go big dog, and

56:18

they're really is an attempt to assimilate,

56:20

Like I'm interpreting it and

56:23

look, it's got four legs, it walks on four legs,

56:25

it's non human, it's not wearing clothes. What's

56:28

going on here? And he said, no, no no, no, that's not a dog, that's

56:30

a horse. This requires

56:32

an accommodation moment because you need to create a category

56:34

that both horses and dogs can fit with it an overarching

56:37

category. And we're doing

56:39

that all the time. Like there are moments where we I

56:41

think of things like that have happened. Uh, politically,

56:43

I don't know how politically you want to give a let's like think

56:45

about the insurrection right the For

56:47

a lot of people, I have positive attitudes toward a certain

56:50

political persuasion, and people

56:52

within that positive attitude space did something

56:54

I don't like. So I have these two feelings. I'm I

56:56

feel negatively and I feel positively about what has

56:58

happened. You could accommodate

57:01

and say, well, it looks like people

57:04

who share my political views sometimes do bad things

57:06

and I need to like have a more complex view of things.

57:09

Or you could assimilate, which is often

57:11

how we get into conspiratorial thinking, and say,

57:13

well, I'm looking at this. What if they didn't do that at all?

57:16

What if those were actors? What if those were people

57:18

who are pretending to be people that agree with

57:20

me? So how do you explain from that? Here's

57:22

the fascinating thing. There was widespread

57:26

disapproval, especially from

57:28

Republican leadership, and then

57:30

very quickly, within

57:32

a sixty days, maybe even less thirty

57:35

days, that faded and then

57:37

it was just a bunch of tourists passing through

57:39

UH through Congress. So was

57:41

it just strictly that sort of tribal

57:45

thing that we needed to to everybody

57:48

to manage people just reverted

57:50

back to their tribalism because there was some

57:52

consensus for a brief period

57:54

and then it went straight back to partisan

57:57

politics. Was that there's a there was a long stretch,

57:59

and there always is where you're you're being pulled

58:01

in every direction. Uh, you know, I don't

58:03

want to make a blanket statement. Most people are pretty rational

58:05

about what happened there. But there's a certain ports

58:07

and the population that went very conspiratorial

58:10

with it, and there is a

58:12

deep crisis of how to

58:14

make sense of the world and where should I put my allegiances

58:17

and where my values expressed. And

58:19

what we would rather do is assimilate

58:22

if we can get away with it, because that allows us to maintain

58:24

our current model and move forward. And

58:26

if we can find an elite who says, no, it's

58:28

okay to think what you think. In fact, I agree with you.

58:31

If I can find peers who will who will support

58:33

me in that, if I can find groups having conversations

58:35

on the Internet who let me do this, I'll assimilate

58:38

and I'll stay within it, and as they say in psychology,

58:40

my social network will reassert its influence.

58:42

So one of the interesting things about the shift

58:45

in UH same sex marriage

58:47

opinion the US is how

58:49

sudden it was, and when we compare it to things

58:52

like abortion rights, Vietnam,

58:54

race voting, even marijuana, all

58:56

those things seem to have taken much

58:59

longer or why is that?

59:01

That was actually the first question I had. I thought that

59:03

that's what the book was going to be about. There's

59:05

a dozen different answers of that question.

59:08

That was sort of a confluence of psychological mechanisms.

59:10

The most influential part of his contact,

59:13

right. There's an idea in psychology

59:15

called pluralistic ignorance, where you know,

59:17

you ask a lot of people have will have a certain

59:19

feeling inside of them, attitude or value,

59:22

and they'll feel like that the only person within their community

59:24

who has that feeling, and unless you

59:26

surface the norm in some way, they are not They won't

59:28

be aware that there are so many other people who feel the same way

59:30

they feel. Surface the norm,

59:32

surface the norm, as they put it. When

59:34

I was asking political scientists about um

59:37

the shift and attitudes about same sex marriage, they

59:39

kept telling me this was the fastest recording shifts in public

59:42

opinion since we've been recording this since the twenties

59:44

and since then. There was an attitude shift

59:46

on COVID nineteam, which I put in the book

59:48

that was a little bit faster, but in this case

59:51

in which direction towards vaccination. Vaccination

59:53

yet which is kind of interesting because there

59:56

was an anti vaxor movement pre COVID

59:59

that was really kind fringe, and

1:00:01

I went to one of the conventions for the book best not in the book.

1:00:03

It was part of the cut material, the Lancet article

1:00:05

on what is an m R M

1:00:08

or R m R and remember which the Musles

1:00:10

rebella MOMPS vaccine,

1:00:13

which was substantly completely debunked.

1:00:15

But what ended up happening is that group

1:00:18

seems to gain a little bit of

1:00:20

momentum, the anti vaxers,

1:00:23

and yet even around the world

1:00:25

most countries are vaccinated,

1:00:29

most wealthy developed countries that with access

1:00:31

to the vaccine, the US is a laggered

1:00:34

um, less vaccinations,

1:00:37

less boosts, and the most per capita

1:00:39

deaths of any advanced

1:00:42

economy, which kind of raises

1:00:44

the question how much of an impact did

1:00:46

the anti vaxers have, even

1:00:48

though a lot of people eventually came around and got

1:00:50

the vaccine. The reason I like to talk about flat

1:00:52

earthers so much is because the same psychological mechanisms

1:00:55

are at play and everything else that we like to talk about. But most

1:00:57

most people assume they would never

1:00:59

be a flat right, But you don't necessarily

1:01:02

get that uniformity

1:01:04

when it comes to things like same sex matters or

1:01:06

or any or any political issue, that anything

1:01:09

becomes charged politically. And

1:01:11

I use flat earthers so much because they're pretty

1:01:13

much neutral and people can feel like they have some distance

1:01:16

from it, and the mechanisms. You can see those mechanisms at play,

1:01:18

and then I can say, and that's also in this

1:01:20

and you can see how it works the with

1:01:22

same sex marriage. That it's almost impossible

1:01:25

to believe this as a person talking to a microphone

1:01:27

right now, in this modern moment, like it wasn't

1:01:30

very long ago. The people argued

1:01:33

about this as vehemently as they argue about

1:01:35

like immigration and gun control and

1:01:37

everything else that's that's a wedge issue today.

1:01:39

And there were articles that would be

1:01:41

that would come out, but like this is something we'll

1:01:43

never get over. You should and you shouldn't talk about this and Thanksgiving

1:01:46

kind of things, right, And then the

1:01:49

course of about twelve years, but very

1:01:51

rapidly, of course, with three or four years, we went from

1:01:54

more than sixty percent of the country opposed to six

1:01:56

in the country in favor and around

1:01:58

two thousand twelve ish, and

1:02:00

the it seemed like, how could this

1:02:02

possibly have happened where it come from. And I want to understand

1:02:05

that too, because I thought if I could take most

1:02:07

of the of the country and put them on a time machine and

1:02:09

send them back a decade, would they argue with themselves

1:02:11

and what happened in between these two moments, and if they were going to

1:02:14

change their mind about this, what was preventing

1:02:16

them from changing their mind the whole time. One

1:02:18

answer to that is that a lot of things that have changed when

1:02:20

it comes to like social issues, people

1:02:23

were separate from one another in social contexts,

1:02:25

whereas with same sex marriage and other LGBTQ

1:02:28

issues, coming out was a very huge

1:02:30

part of that. Any movement that urged people to reveal

1:02:33

their identities and to live openly allow

1:02:36

people the opportunity to go, well,

1:02:38

oh my god, I have a family member like this. I have a person

1:02:40

who I care about who's being affected by this issue.

1:02:42

I have people who my plumber, my

1:02:45

my hairdresser, my brother and

1:02:47

my brother, all this whole world, and

1:02:49

then that contact was part of

1:02:51

that, right, I think that is

1:02:53

the key to this being so

1:02:55

stealthy. Why nobody saw it Because

1:02:58

you go from I know

1:03:00

a guy who's gay, or I know a

1:03:02

woman who's gay too. I know lots

1:03:05

of people who are gay, and over that ensuing

1:03:08

decade and the decade before, at

1:03:10

least from my perspective, it felt

1:03:13

like lots of people both

1:03:15

private and public personas were

1:03:17

coming out as getting and you know, you had

1:03:20

Ellen come out, which was a big deal, and

1:03:22

you had Will and Grace on TV. It

1:03:24

seemed like it was just, you know, the

1:03:26

momentum was building and it was an

1:03:28

exchange like that. And you talked about in the book

1:03:30

where where it's the cascade is

1:03:33

waiting for the network to be ready.

1:03:35

That's EXAs where I'm headed

1:03:37

up. Thanks for kicking me over to The

1:03:39

culture is being influenced by the social change,

1:03:42

and then the social change in reflection influence

1:03:44

of the culture, and this back and forth is what creates

1:03:46

a staggered acceleration of

1:03:48

the social change. Right, But what's

1:03:51

deep within that is understood a network science as

1:03:53

cascades. And the best way I could

1:03:55

like quickly explain what a cascade is is, Uh,

1:03:57

have you ever been to a party and everything seems to be going up

1:04:00

k and then all of a sudden everybody leaves and

1:04:02

you're like, what happened? Especially if with the host, or

1:04:04

have you ever like waited to get into a restaurant,

1:04:06

or if you remember back in a university

1:04:09

setting, you're waiting to get into a classroom

1:04:11

and uh, there's just a big line of people, and

1:04:13

then the door opens up and you could have

1:04:15

gone in at any time. These

1:04:18

are examples of cascades, up cascades and down castkades.

1:04:20

So in a school setting or a restaurant

1:04:22

setting, you're waiting a line. The first person that shows

1:04:25

up, they have an internal signal because

1:04:27

they have no information the doors closed. So

1:04:29

maybe in the past they tried to go to a classroom

1:04:32

and they open the door and everybody turned and looked at them, and they felt

1:04:34

real weird about it. Maybe they just have a

1:04:36

certain kind of social anxiety. There are all sorts

1:04:38

of nature nurture things to give them an internal

1:04:40

signal that says I should wait and see what's

1:04:42

going on. So they take out their phone, they're playing with it.

1:04:44

The second person that shows up, they don't just have

1:04:47

an internal signal. They have one human being who

1:04:49

seems to be waiting and maybe they know something I don't,

1:04:51

So whatever internal signal they have is magnified

1:04:54

by that. They start to wait. Once

1:04:56

you show up at a door and there are two people waiting and

1:04:58

you don't, you're you're pretty

1:05:00

sure you're gonna wait too. Once there are three people waiting

1:05:02

at a door, it's almost inevitable you're gonna

1:05:04

get a line of people waiting because they assume they're part of

1:05:07

something, and everybody knows something they don't, and

1:05:09

you're not with a cascade. The only thing that will break

1:05:11

the cascade is new information out of the system.

1:05:13

The door opens up and like the professor's like, why are

1:05:15

you waiting? Or somebody who looks at their watch

1:05:17

and it's like, I figure we should have been

1:05:19

in here by now. Or you

1:05:21

could have a real rabble rouse, or you could have a subversive

1:05:23

element. Somebody who's a punk. They have a low threshold

1:05:25

for conformity, you know, they're they're like, I don't care what people

1:05:27

think of me. I'm gonna open the door, and that person

1:05:29

will lead everybody in. So what you end up here

1:05:32

with our thresholds of conformity. Uh.

1:05:34

Some people need only a few people around

1:05:36

them to do something before they do it. Some people need a lot. And

1:05:38

any population is going to have a large

1:05:41

mix of people who have different thresholds of conformity.

1:05:43

If you think of it like an old chemistry

1:05:46

molecule with like balls and sticks connect

1:05:48

to it, each person is a node and each

1:05:50

node has a different threshold of conformity,

1:05:52

and that threshold conformity is influenced by how many

1:05:54

people they know, so how many sticks are connected to balls

1:05:57

around them, and you end up

1:05:59

with clumps and claw sters of people who have different

1:06:01

thresholds as a cluster. Let's

1:06:03

say you're at a party and they

1:06:05

want to go because you know they're they're tired of being

1:06:07

there, they have work in the morning or whatever. But there are other

1:06:09

people in the group who are like I would like to go, but

1:06:12

like, I can't just be the first person that leaves. So

1:06:14

the person who has a reason to leave, or they just

1:06:17

don't care what other people think they leave the party.

1:06:19

That that encourages the next group of people who needed

1:06:21

one more person to back them up to leave.

1:06:23

Now there are people who actually did. They wanted to stay

1:06:26

at the party, but hey, if everybody

1:06:28

else is leaving but they're threshold conform you just got me

1:06:30

out there, like I should probably go. And then now you

1:06:32

have the people who are really we're gonna stay all night,

1:06:34

and like I guess in the last person here and either they spend

1:06:36

the night on your couch or they leave and you're like, oh my god, what happened

1:06:39

to my party? This is cascades.

1:06:41

This is a It's a very fascinating part of human

1:06:43

psychology because we're talking about massive groups

1:06:45

of people, and you have a nation of people, you'll have

1:06:48

massive clusters of people that will

1:06:50

have different thresholds, and we often will have one

1:06:53

in that group, many of them called a percolating

1:06:55

local cluster. Anyone listening, who's

1:06:57

in this world? I hope you're happy that I found

1:06:59

your stuff. This stuff was totally unfamiliar

1:07:01

to me. The stuff goes into like diffusion

1:07:03

science and people studying how rocks sink

1:07:05

and floating local

1:07:08

climate. So here's the here's the best thing, uh,

1:07:11

I've ever seen about to explain this, you're

1:07:14

driving down this is Duncan Watts.

1:07:16

Yes, Duncan Watts, the great

1:07:19

sociologist. Everything is he

1:07:21

is. He gave this example to me and

1:07:24

thank him forever for it. You can imagine

1:07:26

a road that people are driving down in the middle

1:07:28

of a forest. There's uh, someone

1:07:30

who smokes a cigarette on the way to wherever they're

1:07:32

going, and they throw a cigarette out pretty much every time at

1:07:35

a certain spot in the forest. And they've been doing this for years and

1:07:37

nothing ever happens, and then one day,

1:07:39

uh, they tossed that cigarette out and it causes

1:07:42

a seven county fire. Now, if

1:07:45

you look at this from a sort of a great Man theory of history,

1:07:47

or you're looking for people who are innovators, if

1:07:49

you look at the whole old tipping point models and

1:07:52

things like that, you're looking for the mavens and the connectors

1:07:54

and everything. Well, it turns out the science doesn't really support

1:07:56

that very well. Has nothing to do with any

1:07:58

individual being more connect that are more powerful

1:08:00

or more savvy than anybody else. What it has to do with

1:08:03

is the susceptibility of the system to anybody

1:08:05

throwing out a cigarette, meaning how dry

1:08:07

or droughts stricken, something happened

1:08:10

in that system. What's going on with dry leaves,

1:08:12

with just the vulnerability of that the

1:08:15

vulnerable that's exactly how they that they're

1:08:17

phrasing the youth. The vulnerability of that particular aspect

1:08:20

of the network at that particular moment was quite vulnerable

1:08:22

to any nudge, any impact

1:08:24

any strike. And the thing that

1:08:26

really struck me about his example

1:08:28

was it could have been a cigarette he tossed out, it

1:08:31

could have been a lightning bolt, it could have been a nuclear

1:08:33

bomb. It didn't matter how powerful it

1:08:35

was, and it didn't matter how connected the person was. You don't

1:08:37

think of it any connection. Uh. In the science

1:08:40

of that connectivity everything, it doesn't matter that

1:08:42

the cluster was vulnerable at that point. And

1:08:44

any complex system is going to be like the surface

1:08:46

of the ocean. There are is constantly

1:08:49

moving around. So if you think of that molecule

1:08:51

model of human connectivity, it's constantly morphing

1:08:53

and changing as people their relationships

1:08:55

change and they move from one group to another. So

1:08:58

the point that's vulnerable is all is

1:09:00

moving. So how do you affect

1:09:02

great change like same sex marriage

1:09:04

or any other social issue that we've seen in the past. You

1:09:07

have to strike at the system relentlessly,

1:09:10

and if you're an individual, you need to get

1:09:12

as many people on your your group to

1:09:14

strike together, and because eventually

1:09:17

you're going to be the lip match in the dry forest.

1:09:19

That's the idea, and you have to let luck

1:09:22

be a big part of it, because you're trying to find the percolating

1:09:24

local cluster that will create the cascade

1:09:26

that will cascade all along the network

1:09:28

because you're different, thresholds of conformity are

1:09:30

moving in and out of the networks that you're affecting. If you

1:09:33

look through any of the history of people

1:09:35

who who have affected great social change, especially

1:09:37

history of the United States, UH, they

1:09:39

had figured out some system by which to get

1:09:42

a lot of people together to strike at the system

1:09:44

relentlessly, and they were indefatigable.

1:09:46

And that was the most important aspect of the whole thing.

1:09:49

And there are all sorts of other ways to nudge and move around,

1:09:51

but that seems to be the essence of it. And that

1:09:54

example from COVID

1:09:56

nineteen, that's what the fastest social

1:09:58

change now ever recorded. They use this. What

1:10:01

they did is they it was people who were very

1:10:04

hesitant to get vaccinated because it was in the UK.

1:10:06

People in certain religious communities were very hesitant

1:10:09

because of their past with the you know, the government

1:10:11

of the UK, and they didn't want to necessarily allow

1:10:13

these government entities they didn't understand very

1:10:15

well to take a needle and put something they didn't understand very

1:10:17

well in their bodies. So organizations

1:10:20

got together with mosques and said

1:10:23

here's the sites where we'll have the vaccinations. And they

1:10:26

they got the the elites within that religious

1:10:28

community too, to be the first to vaccinate.

1:10:30

And so what you end up with is you have this wave

1:10:32

effect of the least hesitant

1:10:35

among the most hesitants. So these are people with the threshold,

1:10:37

the threshold of performity where they will go, well, all

1:10:39

I need is one person I trust to do this, they

1:10:42

get vaccinated. Well, that's a new wave of

1:10:44

people who are vaccinated. So that next level of

1:10:46

hesitancy says, well, this number of people

1:10:48

that I trust have been vaccinated, I'll get vaccinated.

1:10:50

So now you have that next level of hesitancy that they've

1:10:53

been they've been saying, told two friends. And

1:10:55

you eventually wave your way through the cascades

1:10:58

so that when you get to that middle hump that's very hard

1:11:00

to get over, you have so many people vaccinated around

1:11:02

you, it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't be And

1:11:04

it's okay. You only some of the holdouts may

1:11:06

take forever, the last people to buy the facts machine

1:11:08

or whatever, but they're in a world. But you people

1:11:11

that have already, and that's what we're aiming for and so there

1:11:13

are ways to UH to catalyze the cascade

1:11:15

effects, but you have to you have to think of it in terms

1:11:18

of the diffusion model. In this regard

1:11:20

is not that old fashioned, the

1:11:23

early adopter holdout model. It's it's

1:11:25

waves of conformity via the thresholds

1:11:27

cafformity, where you want to build up by

1:11:29

saying this group influences this group together,

1:11:32

they become a new unit, and so on and so on. Quite

1:11:34

quite intriguing. So let's

1:11:36

talk a little bit about this

1:11:39

evolutionary baggage that we have. It

1:11:41

seems that so much

1:11:44

of our decision making UH

1:11:47

is affected by mechanisms

1:11:49

and processes which worked

1:11:52

great on the savannah, but in

1:11:54

a modern world don't

1:11:56

really seem to help us and sometimes hurt us.

1:11:58

Yeah, yeah, the I

1:12:00

mean, that's been a big part of all of my work of the all

1:12:03

these things are adaptive, as that's the phrase you want to use,

1:12:05

like, in all things being equal,

1:12:07

this is probably the best thing to do. But

1:12:10

we get in certain situations where that are unique

1:12:12

to modern life, and it turns out that he can get us in trouble.

1:12:15

So that's the the baggage you're talking

1:12:17

about. Is one of those things where most of the time it

1:12:19

serves as well, but in very specific situations

1:12:21

it goes the other way. Huh. Really

1:12:24

intriguing there. There's there

1:12:26

is some specific evolutionary

1:12:29

or adaptive issues

1:12:31

that come up. Why

1:12:33

do humans argue?

1:12:36

And why is that really a social

1:12:38

dynamic that we all do

1:12:41

when we all evolved to do? I? You

1:12:43

know, this is one of my favorite things that

1:12:45

that change the way I see the world. In

1:12:47

researching the book The Um,

1:12:49

a lot of this also goes back to the interactions model.

1:12:52

With that Mercy and Sperber helped put together,

1:12:54

UM, why would we argue? Well,

1:12:57

the human beings have this

1:12:59

nice, uh, complex and dense

1:13:01

communication system that eventually became

1:13:03

language, and we depend

1:13:06

very much on the signals from other units

1:13:08

in our social network to help us understand

1:13:10

what's going on, to make plans, to

1:13:12

settle on goals, shared

1:13:15

goals, to decide to just do stuff, and

1:13:17

so we do a lot of deliberating and arguing

1:13:19

that space. The problem is,

1:13:22

uh, imagine it like, UM, there

1:13:24

are three people, three proto humans are on a

1:13:26

hill and they're all looking in different directions,

1:13:29

and the none of us can

1:13:31

see what the other two can see, so you

1:13:34

would benefit from some sort of worldview

1:13:36

that is the combination of all three perspectives.

1:13:39

So if I do trust

1:13:42

these people, I know them pretty well, and we're

1:13:44

talking about going to a certain place in the in the forest

1:13:47

together or something. One persons

1:13:49

for it, one persons against it, I'll know

1:13:51

that the person who's for it is young. It's

1:13:54

the first time out. They don't know much about the world.

1:13:56

They're eager to show what they can do. That's

1:13:58

that's that's why they like that. The other news

1:14:00

hesitant. They were in a bear attack two years ago, and

1:14:02

they're I don't know if they really are there,

1:14:04

maybe a little over scared. This is also

1:14:07

I have a pretty good idea of what how to modulate

1:14:09

my trust about when it comes into the deliberation

1:14:11

process. The more

1:14:13

people involved in that process, the more complex

1:14:15

against the more I have to worry about. People

1:14:17

could be misleading me. They could

1:14:20

be wrong just about about no fault

1:14:22

of their own, or they could be purposely

1:14:24

misleading me because they want to get an advantage

1:14:26

over me. So um they use

1:14:28

the phrase we have a built in epistemic

1:14:30

vigilance for when people might be misleading

1:14:32

us. The and that serves

1:14:34

as well too. The only problem is that can lead

1:14:37

to something they call a trust bottleneck. And

1:14:39

a trust bottleneck is when someone

1:14:41

does actually in our group come up with a very innovative

1:14:44

idea. Maybe it's a some

1:14:46

sort of invention. They've created some sort of new way of

1:14:48

doing something. They have an idea about going to

1:14:50

a new territory where they're there's good things for

1:14:52

us to go do there. But it's there's a

1:14:54

risk and reward in it and this, but this

1:14:56

person really is right. If we get into

1:14:59

an argumentation prod yus that's too epistemically

1:15:01

vigilant, then we will end up not doing

1:15:03

the thing that could benefit the group, And so we have this

1:15:05

trust bottleneck that could prevent the calls groups

1:15:08

to stagnate. So we developed

1:15:10

another evolutionary mechanism

1:15:12

to get past trust bottlenecks, and that is arguing

1:15:14

itself. The argumentation process

1:15:17

is how we get through the trust bottleneck created by epistemic

1:15:19

vigilance and go ahead. Ye, So I was gonna

1:15:21

ask, why are we so good at picking

1:15:23

other people's arguments apart and

1:15:25

so terrible at objectively

1:15:28

evaluating all loves so much? There's a uh

1:15:31

this it reminds me something the psychology called the Solomon paradox.

1:15:33

I think it's in business too, with the we're

1:15:36

really good at giving out advice, it's very hard for us

1:15:38

to actually employ in our own lives. Like you, when

1:15:40

somebody has a problem, they tell you and you're like,

1:15:42

here's what you ought to do, But then when you have that exact same problem,

1:15:45

you don't do that thing. Um. There's

1:15:47

some really cool research recently where they have people put on VR

1:15:49

headsets and they walk into a room

1:15:51

in virtuality and see uh Freud

1:15:53

sitting there and uh Freud

1:15:56

says, tell me about your problems, and they sit down and they explained

1:15:58

the problem they're they're having, and then they

1:16:00

run the second time, but the second time, you are

1:16:02

Freud and uh

1:16:05

you see yourself walk in. It's all been recorded.

1:16:07

They even have an avatar with your face and you

1:16:09

hear the audio of yourself telling your

1:16:11

telling you as Freud what your problems are. And

1:16:14

they have around a sixty eight percent success

1:16:16

rate of the person having a breakthrough, Oh

1:16:18

I see what I ought to do now that they couldn't do on their

1:16:20

own. They need to get into this dynamic that we're talking

1:16:22

about meaning looking at it from

1:16:24

with through a different path they need to be they had to get that

1:16:27

evaluation phase. So um,

1:16:29

we have two cognitive mechanisms to really simplify

1:16:32

this. One for the production of arguments,

1:16:34

for the production of justifications

1:16:36

and rationalizations, reasons

1:16:39

why we are doing something. It's important

1:16:41

that in psychology reason is not the big our reason

1:16:43

of philosophy with propositional logic and

1:16:45

all that. It's just coming up for with reasons

1:16:47

for what you think totally rationalization,

1:16:50

rationalization and justification and in some cases

1:16:52

just explanation and why

1:16:55

why do we do this? Well, the the interaccess

1:16:58

model is because we're always imagined the

1:17:00

audience that's going to be receiving the information. That's

1:17:02

why you in your shower you're thinking of

1:17:04

how you're gonna really stick it to that person

1:17:06

on Reddit that you've been arguing with all day? Right? Why?

1:17:09

Because that's the that's how that's

1:17:11

how we produce reasons. But we also do it alone. Like if

1:17:13

I'm imagining I want to buy something on Amazon or

1:17:15

I want to take a trip somewhere, You'll start rationalizing

1:17:18

and justifying it to yourself. And when you when

1:17:20

you want a piece of cake, you will come up with with a

1:17:22

justification. We're getting the cake right, like I didn't need

1:17:24

anything to day, or I did or exercise yesterday,

1:17:26

or whatever it is you need to do. You want to do it, but

1:17:28

you need a justification for it. There's

1:17:31

a humongous body of evidence that we don't even

1:17:33

make the decisions that are best. We only make the decision that's

1:17:35

easiest to justify. And um,

1:17:37

huge mercy and spurn all these great experiments

1:17:40

where they have people um and one of them, they had

1:17:42

people they solve these

1:17:44

word problems, and then they would mix

1:17:46

the answers up and have people evaluate

1:17:48

other people who have been looking at the word problem. But

1:17:50

of course the trick is when one of the answers is

1:17:52

their own, and they would find that when people

1:17:55

were thinking that they were evaluating other people's

1:17:58

arguments, they'd find the holes in

1:18:00

their own like thinking and their own reasoning,

1:18:02

But if they thought they were looking at their own arguments, they'd

1:18:04

usually miss it. So it's an effective

1:18:07

trick. Maybe trick is the wrong

1:18:09

word, but it's an effective technique to

1:18:11

get people to objectively self

1:18:14

analyzes, to make them believe they're

1:18:16

criticizing someone else's argus right, So the

1:18:19

there and what it seems to be the function

1:18:21

here. Why this is so adaptive is

1:18:23

that under a lot of pressure or doesn't

1:18:26

even it doesn't even need to be a group selection process. It's

1:18:28

just simply how the math works out. If

1:18:31

you have a lot of different people with a lot of different

1:18:33

experiences, and they have a lot of different value

1:18:35

sets, and they have a lot of different skill sets, and you're

1:18:37

facing a problem, you're trying to come up with a solution to it,

1:18:39

or you have a goal you want to reach it, you

1:18:41

will be much more effective as a group if everybody

1:18:44

presents their biased individual

1:18:46

perspective and they

1:18:48

don't put a lot of cognitive effort into the production

1:18:50

of it, make it easy, cheap, and

1:18:52

bias. Then you offload the cognitive

1:18:55

labor to that evaluation process that twelve

1:18:57

angry men experience where everyone

1:18:59

looks at each other arguments and goes, okay, this

1:19:01

that, this, that, this that, and over time

1:19:03

that's developed these two mechanisms we have this. Uh.

1:19:05

That's why as individuals, and that's not

1:19:08

one of the biggest problems on the Internet is that we

1:19:10

we do a lot of our deliberating these days

1:19:12

and context that incentivize

1:19:14

the production of arguments, but don't really give

1:19:17

us much opportunity to go through that evaluation

1:19:19

together. There's a phrase you had

1:19:21

in the book that that caught my eye. Debate

1:19:24

leads those who are wrong to change

1:19:26

their minds, and as a group, you want

1:19:28

to get to the best decision, the best outcome.

1:19:31

On the Internet, it's not as much

1:19:34

a real collaborative discussion

1:19:36

argument debate as it is just people yelling

1:19:39

past each other. Yeah, but it feels like, you

1:19:41

know, it looks like a real debate,

1:19:43

but it's not. Yeah, I feel like I'm doing that, you know,

1:19:45

I feel like I'm participating in some sort of

1:19:48

marketplace of ideas. It seems like

1:19:50

I'm doing that. But the way the

1:19:52

platforms are currently set up, for the most part,

1:19:54

it's just people yelling people like

1:19:56

writing on a piece of paper what they think, feeling believe

1:19:58

in, dumping it onto a big pie, and then

1:20:00

other people running through the pile and guard like there's

1:20:03

it's not like a twelve angry man. We're

1:20:05

not actually sitting in a circle and

1:20:07

and or you know, it's not like a dinner party where we're

1:20:10

I'm sure you've had dinner parties or had guests

1:20:12

over who have really wildly different political

1:20:14

views in you and you didn't like get into twitter

1:20:16

mind with them. You talked it out in some

1:20:18

way. That is that that aspect is something

1:20:20

we've yet to tweak the system to allow us in certain

1:20:23

contexts. There was a very amusing cartoon.

1:20:25

I don't remember who who's it was,

1:20:28

but the line was,

1:20:30

what did you do when the United States was overthrown

1:20:33

in the early twenty one century? Oh?

1:20:35

I tweeted my disapproval for and

1:20:38

it just you know what, what

1:20:40

is a hundred forty characters?

1:20:43

It's just it scrolls by

1:20:45

instantly. It's not really that

1:20:48

sort of engaged discussion. I don't mean

1:20:50

to be like, you know, I don't mean to to poople on

1:20:52

social media. It's it's great for what it is. It's just that

1:20:54

it is. But it also is what it is like, it's

1:20:57

been a It's a great tool for giving

1:20:59

voice to people who haven't been part of the conversation

1:21:01

in a long time. It's a great way to gauge

1:21:04

what are people thinking and feeling. But if we want

1:21:06

to do the deliberation thing, the argumentation

1:21:08

thing that moves things around, it's not so

1:21:10

great at that yet and the question

1:21:13

is will will it ever be? Um?

1:21:16

So, so you mentioned twelve angry men.

1:21:18

This is a this is a great line in your

1:21:20

book. All culture is

1:21:22

twelve angry men at scale. Yeah,

1:21:25

go into some detail about you know, as

1:21:27

plays right off what we were just discussing, like the

1:21:30

the everything we've ever achieved as species

1:21:32

of note as came out of a lot of people disagreeing

1:21:35

and then like sorting it out and there

1:21:37

are um we've been great at

1:21:39

creating some some institutions that do

1:21:41

this on purpose, like science when it's

1:21:44

done well is a group of people debating

1:21:46

and argument with the other and trying to tear each other's ideas. But

1:21:48

there's a good faith in signs and

1:21:51

elsewhere that you may not get on

1:21:53

on Reddit or Twitter. It's so crucial

1:21:55

to create creating the rules of the game, and we all play

1:21:57

by it. And you I've

1:22:00

that you if I meet you on the street or I meet

1:22:02

you on the internet, like we may not be in a good

1:22:04

faith environment, we're going to play by those rules that that

1:22:07

That's why it was so nice to create these systems

1:22:09

of argumentation like law and UH

1:22:11

medicine and academia, the and

1:22:14

most of the people that we I'm very against

1:22:17

the great Man theory of things that where you imagine

1:22:19

single inventors coming up with amazing insights

1:22:21

like no one ever does anything in isolation like that. The

1:22:24

and a lot of the even the people we've lauded throughout history,

1:22:26

they had either someone that they bounced ideas with

1:22:29

across and against, or they

1:22:32

collaborated with, or they

1:22:34

were absolutely assaulted over and over again by

1:22:36

people who disagreed with them, and they had to refine their arguments

1:22:38

in the presence of all of that. And

1:22:41

that's why I talk about culture being twelve agrement scale

1:22:43

like once any like society

1:22:46

five figures out a way to institutionalize those things.

1:22:48

That's when you get those massive leaps, and both

1:22:51

in the social domain and the political domain and the scientific

1:22:53

and technological domains. So so,

1:22:55

given all of these things we've been talking

1:22:57

about, from tribalism

1:23:00

to identity, how do we get

1:23:02

people to actually change their mind?

1:23:04

What are the three key things people

1:23:07

need to have happened

1:23:09

to them in order to get a

1:23:11

major shift in their position. We

1:23:13

know it would be difficult, I think, to pick just three things,

1:23:16

but I can think of a couple of things that we fit in here. I

1:23:18

think one thing I want people to understand

1:23:20

is all persuasion and self persuasion, uh

1:23:23

most mostly when it comes to change people's minds,

1:23:25

what you're trying to do is alert them the fact that they could

1:23:28

change their mind. So a little bit of socratic

1:23:30

process is you you're guiding

1:23:33

them to something and if they're not willing,

1:23:35

then they're never going to change them. And it's you know, we

1:23:38

all we talk a lot about how facts don't seem to work

1:23:40

so well. Uh, that's only because the

1:23:42

usually when you start arguing somebody over an issue

1:23:45

you want to present them, you'll say like, hey, read this book,

1:23:47

Hey watch this YouTube video, Hey go to this website,

1:23:50

and you're like, that should do it. But how's that?

1:23:52

Has that ever happened to you? Like, never has anyone

1:23:54

sent me a YouTube video? And I've been like, oh, okay,

1:23:56

I never know it though, change

1:23:59

my mind, said nobody. And that's the idea

1:24:01

of that is you there's a reasoning.

1:24:03

There's a chain of processing involved in reasoning

1:24:05

where you are probably unaware that you went

1:24:07

through all this and it landed on a particular conclusion

1:24:09

because it made sense to you had matched

1:24:11

your values and your attitudes and your beliefs on the matter,

1:24:14

and you have to afford the other person

1:24:16

the opportunity to go through that same process. You

1:24:18

can't meet them at the level of the conclusion, because what ends

1:24:21

up happening you just start tossing these these

1:24:23

facts that support your position at each

1:24:25

other instead of having a conversation

1:24:27

in which we're looking at the issue together. Right. So

1:24:29

that's one thing, is like you can't copy and paste

1:24:31

your reasoning into another person. And when you're trying

1:24:33

to argue just based off facts and links and stuff,

1:24:36

that's really what you're suggesting they ought to do. So

1:24:39

all persuasion self persuasion. I have to open up

1:24:41

a space for you to explore your own reasoning, and

1:24:43

I have to open up a space for you to to entertain different

1:24:46

perspectives and to think about where your stuff comes from.

1:24:48

Was what we did earlier in the conversation. Secondly,

1:24:50

you have to recognize that we're

1:24:53

social creatures, so people are influenced

1:24:55

by the signaling and the expectations

1:24:57

of the people around them. If you say

1:25:00

anything to that person that could be interpreted as you ought

1:25:02

to be ashamed for what you think, feeling, believe, conversations

1:25:04

over. At that point, no one was willing

1:25:07

to be ostracized. The great sociologist

1:25:09

Brooke Harrington told me that there was an Eagles mc Square

1:25:11

of social science. It would be social

1:25:14

death. The fear of social death is greater than the fear of

1:25:16

physical death. Literally a quote I have written down

1:25:18

because I thought it was so so, and

1:25:21

she ran me through a hundred examples where this is the true, from

1:25:23

war to excommunication, to go

1:25:26

down the list. It is social. Social

1:25:28

death is actual death in most of

1:25:30

history. And I don't care who you are, what kind of profession

1:25:32

you're in. You're worried about other people around

1:25:35

you, and that profession think about you, and you're modulating

1:25:37

your behavior to go with and your modulating your beliefs, attitudes

1:25:39

and values. And when

1:25:41

it comes down to it, if the situation

1:25:43

requires it, you'll put your reputation

1:25:46

on the lifeboat and you will let your body

1:25:48

sink to the bottom of the ocean if that's the situation you're

1:25:50

put in. And Dueling and all

1:25:52

those things we do,

1:25:55

I'll talk all about the book Dueling Last a long time

1:25:57

was really peculiar, but it was just this system out of

1:25:59

ann troll. And if I'm

1:26:01

trying to discuss an issue with you and I've

1:26:04

put you in that state of mind, you

1:26:06

there's no what you're what you're gonna do is react.

1:26:08

You're gonna push back against me. Then I'm

1:26:10

going to get feel that feeling. I'm going to push back against

1:26:12

you, and then you push back harder, I push back harder, and

1:26:14

we end up in that stupid phrase of well,

1:26:17

let's agree to disagree. Well, we already agree to disagree.

1:26:19

That's how we sat down here, right. We're really saying

1:26:21

is stopped talking to me, And that's what that is, is

1:26:24

a nice we're agreeing to stop arguing

1:26:26

with the data. We're agreeing to to never actually

1:26:28

advance this issue and never talk to each other again. So

1:26:31

never open up the conversation with anything

1:26:34

that could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed, even

1:26:36

if they should be ashamed of what they're feeling and thinking.

1:26:38

If you're hoping to persuade them, you have to not do that.

1:26:41

And then the so be aware that they're a social

1:26:43

primate. You're a social primate. Never try to copy

1:26:45

and paste your reading and the other person and

1:26:48

the most important part is that you have

1:26:50

to get out of debate frame.

1:26:53

Don't don't create a dynamic work.

1:26:55

I want to win, I want you to lose. I want to show that I'm right

1:26:57

and you're wrong. This

1:26:59

is this is the most crucial

1:27:02

thing. If you take nothing else away from it, take this, think

1:27:04

of it. We're like hum, I find you a reasonable,

1:27:07

rational, interesting human being, and it's ad that I

1:27:09

disagree with you on this. I wonder why

1:27:11

I disagree with you? Our disagreement

1:27:14

is a mystery. What if we teamed up to solve

1:27:16

a mystery together why we disagree? And

1:27:18

now we're taking all these things that are adaptive

1:27:21

and usually in a way that could actually get us

1:27:23

further along and settle. And what might actually

1:27:25

happen is we both realized we're both wrong. What

1:27:28

we we get to vin diagram ourselves.

1:27:30

So you go from face off to shoulder shoulder

1:27:32

and this if There are many different ways to go about

1:27:34

it, but once you get in that dynamic, you're much more

1:27:36

likely to persuade each other

1:27:38

of something and move the attitude the room

1:27:41

quite fascinating. So let's jump to our

1:27:43

speed round. I'm going to ask all

1:27:45

these questions thirty seconds or less.

1:27:47

I'm gonna do my best. These are These

1:27:49

are what we ask all of our guests, starting

1:27:52

with what are you streaming

1:27:54

or listening? To? Tell us what what Netflix,

1:27:57

Amazon Prime podcasts kept

1:27:59

you entertained the past couple of years? Cool very quickly.

1:28:01

My favorite podcast has always been are still is

1:28:03

Decoder Ring? I recommended to everybody.

1:28:05

I love it. Will A Paskin is amazing best

1:28:07

show US stream and recently it's definitely Severance.

1:28:09

Everybody should have seen Severance by now. Also

1:28:12

the rehearsal. You can see the kind of stuff that I like watch.

1:28:15

Someone just recommended the rehearsal and said

1:28:17

it reminded them of Severance

1:28:19

and how out there? Ye watch that? And then

1:28:21

like, I'm among those people that please video

1:28:23

games the highest form of art. You definitely

1:28:26

play Death Stranding And

1:28:28

I replayed BioShock recently because I interviewed Douglas

1:28:30

rush Kof and we were talking about BioShock and it

1:28:32

still holds up. Who are some of your mentors

1:28:34

who helped you develop your your

1:28:37

view of psychology and cognitive

1:28:39

issues? And you know, persuasion

1:28:42

Gene Edwards my first, like the first psychology

1:28:44

professor that took me inside aside and said

1:28:46

let's be friends and really talking about it. I owe a lot

1:28:49

to her, you know people who I've met in real

1:28:51

life. Whoever. James Burke is the most

1:28:53

influential person in my life. I loved his

1:28:55

show years ago. I think it was BBC

1:28:57

How the Universe Change, How the Universe change? And

1:28:59

can actions? And I can Connections only

1:29:02

for people listening to this. I worked with Johnson

1:29:04

and UH, James Burke all over all

1:29:06

throughout COVID to develop a new Connection series

1:29:09

really and I can't say anything else

1:29:11

about it, but it will be coming out with in the next year. Very

1:29:13

exciting. I love his stuff. What are

1:29:15

some of your favorite books? And what are you reading

1:29:17

right now? Let me say, as far as authors,

1:29:20

I love UH, John Jeremiah Sullivan,

1:29:22

UM, Charlie Laduff, Michael

1:29:25

Perry, Larry Brown, all these there are

1:29:27

either people who are in Southern Gothic literature or

1:29:30

or the Southern Gothic literature version of journalism.

1:29:32

I can't get enough of that stuff. Our last two questions,

1:29:34

what sort of advice would you give to a recent

1:29:36

college grad who was interested

1:29:39

in a career of either journalism

1:29:41

or psychology or anything related

1:29:44

to to your field. I'll give you. I'll give

1:29:46

you two solid pieces of advice that aren't

1:29:48

just high minded like that sounds nice, and they can

1:29:50

put it on postcard things. This is what you gotta do. Number

1:29:52

one, Email the people that you admire

1:29:54

or the people you'd like to interview. I have about

1:29:56

a seventy percent success rate of when

1:29:59

I was good starting out of people. They will at least email

1:30:01

you back and say I can't talk, but you'd be surprised

1:30:03

how many people are willing to talk to you. Just do

1:30:05

that, and then on this on the back end, make content

1:30:07

out of that and give it away for free until you build up

1:30:09

an audience. We now live in an environment

1:30:12

we've been living in it for about twenty years now where

1:30:14

the people who are going to offer their hand to get you on

1:30:16

stage, they care about whether or not you have an audience. Yet

1:30:18

you can build that audience without anybody's permission

1:30:21

right now, and you can do that by making content

1:30:23

on TikTok YouTube, putting it out on a medium

1:30:25

wherever you put your stuff. So do those two

1:30:27

things back to back. Email the people you want, and

1:30:29

they make content out of those emails and give

1:30:32

it away for free into you have an audience, develop your

1:30:34

voice. Love that idea. Final question,

1:30:37

what do you know about the world of psychology,

1:30:40

changing minds and persuasion today

1:30:42

that you wish you knew twenty or so

1:30:44

years ago when you were first getting started. No

1:30:47

one's unreachable, No one's unpersuadable.

1:30:50

There's no such thing. And I think of it

1:30:52

more like if you try to reach the moon with a ladder,

1:30:55

you'll fail, and if you assume

1:30:57

from that that the moon is unreachable, then you really learn

1:30:59

nothing right. And that's what I actually had thought

1:31:01

for a long time. And it turns out the frustration I was feeling

1:31:04

to where other people should have been directed to myself for not

1:31:06

trying to understand, well, why is this

1:31:08

not working the way I thought it should work. The assumption

1:31:11

that they're stupid or they're misled, are

1:31:13

there nefarious in some way?

1:31:16

That was a real misconception

1:31:19

on my part, the misconception that people are

1:31:21

just absolutely unreachable and unpersuadable.

1:31:25

I have, through the work of this book changed

1:31:27

my mind. Thank you, David for being so generous

1:31:29

with your time. We have been speaking

1:31:32

with David McRaney, the award

1:31:34

winning science journalist and author

1:31:36

of the book How Minds Change

1:31:38

The Surprising science of belief,

1:31:41

opinion, and Persuasion. If

1:31:44

you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check

1:31:46

out any of our four hundred previous discussions

1:31:48

over the past eight years. You can

1:31:50

find those at iTunes, Spotify,

1:31:53

YouTube, wherever you feed your podcast

1:31:55

fix. You can sign up from my

1:31:58

daily reading list at rittle dot

1:32:00

com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts. I

1:32:03

would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team

1:32:05

that helps put these conversations together each

1:32:07

week. Justin Milner was my audio

1:32:09

engineer. Atico val Bron

1:32:12

is my project manager. Paris

1:32:14

Wald is my producer. Sean

1:32:16

Russo is my head of research.

1:32:19

I'm Barry Ridholts. You've been listening

1:32:21

to Masters in Business on Bloomberg

1:32:23

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